Flashback 1993: "Shiver like rhesus monkeys"

        The 95th Scripps National Spelling Bee ends today in Maryland, and as usual, I cast a wistful smile back to a time, exactly 30 years ago, when I spent a year reporting on the bee, tagging along after Sruti Nadimpalli, 12, on her quest to win the 1993 bee  for my book, "Complete and Utter Failure." It was a creative piece of reporting, back then. Spelling Bees were not literary cliches, back then, Not seen as worthy of more than passing contemplation — and I can take a bit of credit for the bee-as-literature subgenre that later formed, as Myla Goldberg, in her novel "Bee Season," credits that chapter with getting the gears turning.  
     The bee often veered into tedium, and I used a technique I called "Showing the wires" — you see me, trying to report the story. This is from a chapter called, "Shiver Like Rhesus Monkeys" and this scene, at the National Bee finals in Washington, D.C., excerpt explains why:

      In the press room, I find three Scripps-Howard staffers — college kids, in spelling bee T-shirts. They are hanging out, having fun; and introducing myself, I join them. "You have to meet Mr. Bee," says Ellen Morrison, a DePauw University senior, taking me up to a 3-foot-high wood-and-wire bee figure. Mr. Bee has a pleasing, 1950s, Reddy Kilowatt feel, and I suggest they would sell more bee T-shirts if they put his picture on them rather than the present drab sextet of stylized words (a multicolored "spectrum," "staccato" written over musical bars, a striped "zebroid" and so on).
     We have a wide-ranging conversation about the bee. The volunteers are surprisingly loose with negative information. Joel Pipkin, a recent graduate from Midwestern State University, suggests that the bee is a good way for junior high school kids to pick each other up — he has seen contestants holding hands. Just joking, of course, he quickly adds. Ha-ha-ha. they tell me about nervous kids falling off the stage, and about the Comfort Room, a chamber off the ballroom where the failed contestants are immediately led to compose themselves after missing their words.
     "You won't be allowed in, because the kids will be upset," says Shannon Harris, another DePauw student.
     "And because you're a journalist," adds Ellen Morrison, who seems to have a thing against journalists, so much so that I ask why. She explains that a few days earlier the Washington Post ran a scathing article about the bee, and so everybody on the bee staff is skittish around reporters. I thank her for this information.
     They are so forthcoming with damning details about the bee that I find myself laboriously explaining the journalistic process to them. I say something like, "You understand that I'm a writer. I'm talking to you because I'm writing a book, which will be published and the general public will then read." Normally this speech is reserved for people I suspect of having limited mental capacity, given in the hope of helping them to comprehend what is going on and reducing the chances of their being surprised to see their words in print later on.
     The next morning, I get to the bee a half hour early, thinking I must sit with the parents since I haven't been accredited as a reporter. The first person I run into is Ellen Morrison, barely recognizable in her peach publicist's suit and done-up hair. She flaps over to me, a flurry of concern, worried that I will quote her candid comments of the day before "out of context."
     The concept of being quoted out of context was invented, I believe, by people who blurt out ill-advised statements and then regret them later. True out-of-context distortion — someone saying, "It's not as if I'm a thing of evil," and being quoted as bragging "I'm a thing of evil" — is rare to the point of being unknown.
     On the other hand, highlighting controversial statements over the more mundane is the basis of reporting. That's what news is. If I interview a kindly old kindergarten teacher who spends forty-five minutes telling me how much she loves the kids, and bakes them cookies shaped in the letters of their names, and then suddenly adds, "Of course, what I'd really like to do is to strip the little buggers naked and torture them to death with a potato peeler," her previous sentiments suddenly diminish in value. Perhaps, from her perspective, it is unfair to seize on a single sentence and obsess over it, ignoring for the most part her loftier expressions. But from the perspective of everybody else, I don't have much choice.
     I try to reassure Morrison that, Janet Malcolm notwithstanding, most journalists are not out to pointlessly skewer innocent subjects. We don't have to. The beauty part of the profession is that the guilty almost always find a way to impale themselves, with little or no assistance necessary.
     As if to prove my point, Morrison takes me in into the Comfort Room, which I have asked to see beforehand, since as a journalist I will not be allowed to enter once the bee begins.
    She gives me a quick tour of the narrow, elegant little room. Her narration, in the best and most in-context transcription I can make off my tape, is as follows, beginning with her pointing out a few objects in the room:

    "Mr. Bee. Food. Dictionary. Parents are allowed back here. No journalists are allowed back here. We'll have some upset kids back here. Usually we have a curtain across the middle so the ones that are crying usually go hide behind it in the corner and shiver like rhesus monkeys, you know: wooo, ooo, ooo."

     I'll never forget standing there, holding my little miniature tape recorder, as Morrison said that, thinking, "You people are insane..." 

     

Love, luck, loss: How Lisa Rezin lived is a lesson for all of us

Lisa Rezin (from left) with daughters Ashlee Rezin and Dawn Baxter.

     It’s a five-hour drive from Detroit to Chicago. Yet Lisa Rezin would make the trip just to attend a school play featuring one of her nieces and nephews. Or go to the Shedd with her grandchildren. Or the beach. Or to take her family to the theater — she bought tickets for everybody to see “West Side Story” at the Lyric Opera in June.
     That’s how she rolled.
     “She used to say, ‘I’m your biggest fan,’” said Dawn Baxter, her older daughter. “She made everybody feel like that. Went to every event for her nieces and nephews. She really was their biggest fan.”
     Her family will have to go to “West Side Story” without her. Lisa Rezin, age 64, died last Thursday from a particularly aggressive form of cancer, diagnosed in March.
     Which is how she entered my world — her younger daughter, Ashlee Rezin, is an ace photographer at the Sun-Times. She asked me to help the family collect their thoughts for the obituary in the Detroit Free Press. I talked to Ashlee, Dawn and their father, Bobby, then wrote up my notes. As a creative effort, it was akin to taking three bowls of diamonds, scooping a few gems out of each and putting them in a fourth, larger bowl. It didn’t require any creativity or effort on my part to make the result sparkle.
     Though as we spoke, there was something I really wanted to say, but managed to hold back. Shutting up is an art form, one that I have imperfectly mastered. One thought kept waving its hand in the back of my mind.
     “You’re so lucky!”

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Memorial Day, 2023

 
 

     I was happy just to leave the house Monday, walk around the corner to Cherry Street with my wife, and sit on the curb on Cherry Street, the dog between us, on a beautiful May morning. The fact that a parade would soon pass by, well, icing on the cake.

     Yes, I noticed the big public works trucks parked to block the side streets. Keeping us safe. But didn't think too deeply about them. For a smart guy, I can ignore stuff when I want to. My wife drew attention to the heightened security, observing that it made her, paradoxically, feel less secure. A reminder of the changed reality.

     This was the first patriotic holiday after the July 4 shooting in Highland Park, a few suburbs to the east and north. There didn't seem to be an unusual amount of police around. My wife observed that Greenbriar Elementary School was directly behind us. The roof. I countered that the roof was pretty steeply sloped. Not much of a perch for a sniper. Still, what she was suggesting rattled me, a little, and I idly wondered what we'd do if something happened. Run away. That way, I guess.   Would we make it across the street? Maybe not.

     The parade kicked off promptly at 10:30 a.m. with a Northbrook policeman on a motorcycle. Then the flag color guard and the vets. We stood and clapped. I removed my hat. Thumbs up to Tom Mahoney, commander of American Legion Post 791. We have coffee sometimes. A wave to my neighbor Ray Garcia, in his Vietnam watch cap.

     Then vets from Covenant Village, marching alongside the retirement center's bus. The junior high school band. Then the Boy Scouts, the Cub Scouts — which included, I noted with satisfaction, girl Cub Scouts. A big deal, at the time. Now, not so much. Then the actual Girl Scouts. No boy Girl Scouts, that I noticed. Maybe that's next. The high school band. One fire truck. And to end the parade, another cop on a motorcycle.

     That's it. I looked at my watch: 10:37 a.m. Seven minutes — or less. I didn't check the time when it started. It could have been a minute or two late. A seven-minute parade. Maybe five.

     We made our way home, stopping to talk to Zelig Moscowitz — he runs Circle of Friends, an outreach program for people with disabilities. "Important work," I told him. I knew his father, Daniel, head of the Chabad in Chicago. And his brother, Meir. By the Village Hall, a firefighter who lives in Huntley said hello. I reminded him of the parade in 2000 to celebrate Northbrook's 100th anniversary. With 100 fire trucks. I had one of those bulky video cameras, and was filming the trucks. It was heavy, and my arm would get tired. But every time I lowered the camera, my 5-year-old started to cry. He didn't want to miss preserving a single firetruck. I don't know if we ever looked at the video. Probably not. He lives in San Francisco now.

      We spoke to assorted neighbors. Other people walked past — a man and his two sons arrived for the parade, too late, and missed it all. The boys seemed to take it well — perhaps the reality hadn't yet dawned that they were heading home. We felt bad for them. One neighbor speculated that the parade was so short because the village didn't want the logistical headache of securing a longer parade. A seven-minute parade is enough of a soft target. They didn't want to push their luck with 10 or 15 minutes. The entire parade route was five blocks long.

     Yes, it was sad that they felt the need to dial back the parade — if that is indeed what happened. And that heavy public works trucks had to be parked at intersections, to deter ... what? Suicide bombers. Vehicles racing down side streets to plow into the Boy Scouts? Anything is possible, in the worst sense of the term.

     Still. I'm still glad they held the parade. "A community building event" I told the firefighter. We don't live in a world where sleepy suburbs are too afraid to hold Memorial Day parades. Not yet, anyway. If violence is contagious, maybe so is tranquility. Maybe some of it will rub off.

75 years, 10 mayors: How Sun-Times coverage of City Hall evolved

     Look at the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times for Monday, May 15. Inauguration Day, the day Brandon Johnson would be sworn in as the city’s 57th mayor. What don’t you see?
     Well, no beaming mayoral portrait, for starters. No gushing headline, “A new era” or some such thing. The main page-one story is about a suburban mom with kidney failure.
     The arrival of a new mayor gets a plug in the upper right corner: “HOW JOHNSON COULD AVOID INAUGURAL MISSTEP OF LIGHTFOOT” referring readers to an article pointing out that inaugural addresses are remembered mainly for their gaffes, and inviting political pros to speculate about ditches Johnson should take care to avoid.

     That skepticism is hard-won. Survey the Sun-Times’ coverage of the fifth floor of City Hall since its birth 75 years ago, and what stands out is the progress from credulous mouthpiece to critical observer and relentless investigator, making the waves that rock the mayor’s office.
     The daily Sun-Times began publication quietly — the union of the Sun and the Times was a cost-cutting move — in February 1948, and in the early years could often be found curled up in the lap of Mayor Martin Kennelly, purring contentedly.
     “The public approval of the Kennelly businessman administration reflects the people’s confidence in his integrity,” a purported news article insisted on April 15, 1948. “His policy of good government first and politics last has ‘sold’ Chicago citizens though it has aroused some grumbling among the politicos.”
     Though even in that praise, the unnamed writer pauses to note: “The most significant lack has been in the police department.” Some things never change.
     Kennelly was a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil millionaire businessman, a bachelor who lived with his sister. The Sun-Times did notice shady doings around him. The Democratic paper had no trouble going after a Democratic administration when corruption was involved. Great New Yorker press critic A.J. Liebling, who lived in Chicago during the winter of 1949-1950, noted this about the Sun-Times in his classic travelogue, “The Second City:”
     “It sometimes raises a great row with stories about local political graft. Although Chicago municipal graft is necessarily Democratic, since the city’s government is Democratic, it is the Sun-Times, rather than the Tribune, that gets indignant.”

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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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