Flashback 1996: "A leery owner learns the power of the pet'

Anna, left, Vronsky and Gizmo share a bite.

     Yesterday's column included lots of cats.

     Which might make it seem strange that I then thought, "More cats!"

     It's not a subject I turn to much. 

     But it's mid-June. Time to slow down a bit. Here, in one of my first columns, I tell a story I've since  repeated many, many times.

     I hate to identify myself as a cat man. There is something, oh I don't know, dainty about male cat owners.
     Cats are so feminine, after all. They don't have the rough and tumble manliness of dogs. No presidential candidate, surely, would allow himself to be photographed roughhousing with his cats.
     But if those guys who collect Barbies, and line their apartments with custom shelves, can publicly admit it, then I suppose that I can cop to cats.
     And besides, they're my wife's cats, really. Lord knows I hated them to begin with. I would have married her years earlier if she didn't have cats, if she didn't discipline them in a loud voice, at the breakfast table, while I cringed behind the morning paper.
     We got married, despite the cats — a brother and sister pair, white with gray splotches, that she named Anna and Vronsky, for the doomed lovers in Anna Karenina.
     Like other aspects of domestic life, the cats grew on me. Anna is a fat cat, a little mean, intelligent, single-minded in her pursuit of food. Vronsky is thin, sweet and somewhat dim.
     They never leave the house. Bringing pets outdoors only causes problems, as evidenced by Tina Popplewell, who found herself in court last week after her dog got hit by a car and was saved by something called "Pet Rescue," which later tried to hold the animal hostage, apparently for ransom for the $810 owed for medical care.
     I've learned to have a healthy skepticism about pet groups. They rain compassion down upon dumb animals yet always seem to suddenly yank it back when a human enters the picture.
     There is some question over whether Popplewell offered to pay over time, and was rebuffed, or whether it was the other way around.
     The woman did, however, strong-arm her dog back, which is not surprising. I know that should our cats, say, be kidnapped by Saddam Hussein and kept under less-than-ideal conditions in a cat prison in Baghdad, my wife — a slim, slight woman — wouldn't think twice before assembling a group of cat-loving mercenaries who, with faces blackened and AK-47s clutched to their chests, would make a low-level commando parachute drop over the desert. They'd get those cats back.
     The snafu with Pet Rescue reminds me of the nightmare of getting our cats in the first place from the well-regarded Anti-Cruelty Society on LaSalle Street. There we saw Anna and Vronsky, about eight years ago, two tiny white kitties, huddled together in a bare cage.
     My wife-to-be's heart melted. She wanted those cats. We went to fill out the paperwork — the Anti-Cruelty Society interrogates you to make sure you aren't going to serve your new pets for dinner or sell them to the Iraqis.
     A line on the form demanded a landlord's consent. But her landlord wasn't available — it was a Saturday — and adoption was held up until he could be found.
     "Oh," said the clerk, off-handedly, sending us away. "It looks like one of these kittens is sick. He might have to be put down tonight."
     Well, my wife-to-be already loved those cats. While she stood distraught out on the sidewalk, I tried to grease the skids with the Anti-Cruelty Society volunteer.
     "Look, this is Chicago," I said, winking largely, pulling out my wallet and thumbing through the twenties. "Surely, we can work something out. Maybe I can adopt the cats."
     But the same rigidity that sent Pet Rescue to the cops stiffened the spines of the Anti-Cruelty Society — or the "Cruelty Society," as I later dubbed them. They sent us away, to search madly for my wife-to-be's landlord and pray that the little kitty wouldn't be dispatched to the compassion of the society's gas chambers before we could return.
     Sunday dawned. We were there when they opened the doors, and bolted for the cage where the cats had been. Another woman was making a beeline for the two white kittens, but my wife-to-be gave her a Chris Chelios shoulder check and claimed them. "Those are my cats!" she shouted.
     We hadn't found her landlord, but in true lawyerly style, she pointed out a line in her lease about pets not being permitted to "soil the sidewalks." Pets couldn't soil the sidewalk, she argued, ergo pets were permitted. A shaky case, but the Cruelty Society people bought it.
     As the years passed, first she, then I, fell under the spell of the cats. Like many pet owners, each new day holds the prospect of being held hostage by skyrocketing medical costs. If we learned we had to mortgage our home to send one of the cats to the Mayo Clinic for a heart transplant, we might not snap at it, but we sure would give the situation hard thought.
     That's what pets do to people — they burrow into your soul and stay there. Pet Rescue should be ashamed of itself for hounding this poor woman, if indeed it did.
     And the woman, on the other hand, should pay what she owes, over time if necessary. It's only right.

        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 18, 1996

A visit to cat heaven

Kaye Larsen Olloway, founder of Fat Cat Rescue (photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin)

     “Do you want to meet my husband?” asks Kaye Larsen Olloway, pausing from portioning out soft cat food on her flower bedecked patio to scoop up an off-white, 17-year-old cat and press him to her cheek. “This is Johnny Ringo. He’s so sweet. He has five other wives. We fight over him.”
     Hard to know where to go with that information. Umm, named for the Beatle?
     “You know why we named him that?” Olloway replies. “When you look at his tail, he has five orange rings on his tail.”
     The naming of cats might have been a difficult matter for poet T.S. Eliot. But it’s just part of the daily routine at Fat Cat Rescue in Wadsworth, where hundreds of feral cats trapped on the street are taken to live in genteel comfort on a seven-acre farm, with a pond, a three story antique barn and various quaint outbuildings decorated with cats in mind.
     Outside, an electrified fence keeps predators away, while inside, many walls have wooden chairs, legs removed, strategically mounted so cats can leap up, get comfortable and observe life from a comfortable distance.
     At 7:30 a.m. on a recent beautiful June morning, Olloway places cardboard troughs of food around the compound, keeping up a steady conversation.
     ”Hi, babies!” Olloway says. “What’s going on here, huh?”
     The felines present themselves for scratches — they seem more interested in love than food — and are introduced: Sammy the Bull, Gracie Mae, who just got over an illness. Baby Blue, who is called, conversationally, Blue-Blue, or just Baby (“a cat must have three different names” Eliot writes).

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‘A beacon of light in a dark world’

"Drag March for Change," June 14, 2020. (Photograph for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin)

      This is my fourth column in a yearlong series celebrating the paper's 75th anniversary. Since June is Pride Month, it seems apt to look at how we've covered the LGBTQ community. In the paper today, this runs alongside reflections by Tracy Baim and Ismael Perez.

      Night-shift reporters do what the desk tells them to. And this night, late in 1991, a sneering little bully of an assistant city editor I thought of as “Quartz” ordered me to get myself over to the Town Hall police station.
     “The cops are having a meeting with the fags,” he said, or words to that effect. "Go see what it's about."
     I went. The night is seared into my mind for the pure slapstick quality. The police, embarrassed, formal, had actually brought a rape specialist — the cops’ thinking no doubt being, “gays=sex crimes” — to talk to the group. They did ask about the safety concerns of what we still called the homosexual community, and those gathered responded in one voice: We’re afraid of the police.
     As Windy City Times columnist Paul Varnell eloquently put it that night: “I’ve been arrested and I’ve been mugged and I’d rather be mugged.”
     At the time, as a night reporter, my interaction with what is now thought of as the LGBTQ+ community came through protests — AIDS awareness, Act-Up, Silence=Death vigils around the governor’s Chicago residence. But that was only one phase of a long history.
     The Chicago Sun-Times, published since February 1948, has reflected and led society’s slow integration of sexualities that depart from traditional heterosexual male/female roles. (As well as, sometimes, lagged behind.) This being our 75th anniversary as a daily newspaper, and Pride Month, it’s a good time to look back.
     The word “homosexual” didn’t appear in the paper until May 1948, in an AP report of a “homosexual ring” charged with sodomy at the University of Missouri. Gays tended to appear in print related to crime or in reviews of edgy books and plays, with an occasional vice story, such as Mayor Martin Kennelly closing a couple of bars for “homosexual activities.”
     Of course, no period is as uniform as it seems at a remove. There is a story in 1950 quoting the Kinsey report that “homosexual contacts accounted for as much as 22.6 percent of the total sexual outlet of bachelor men from 31 to 35 years old” and the “Kinsey figures on women it can be anticipated will show an even greater incidence of homosexuality among women.” The news is delivered plainly and without sensation.
Advice, sympathy from Ann Landers
     The most important writer at the paper changing attitudes about gays and lesbians was Eppie Lederer, known to the world as Ann Landers, who wrote a widely syndicated advice column.

     “Dear Ann Landers,” a letter published in the Sun-Times in 1961 begins, “I’m a happily married man who needs an outside opinion....”
     A childhood friend had moved to town; brilliant, talented, thoughtful, kind.
     “The problem is, he’s a homosexual,” the letter continued. “His effeminate manner, his haircut as well as his flamboyant manner of dress leaves no room for speculation.”
     The writer wanted to invite the man to dinner, but his wife forbade him even to be seen talking to his old friend. “It will ruin us, socially,” she said.
     “I feel like a heel ignoring him,” the man wrote. “Please give me your thinking.”
     Today, Ann Landers’ response at first might seem unsympathetic, even shocking.
     “You wouldn’t snub a friend if he was crippled by polio, would you?” she began. “Well your boyhood friend is an emotional cripple.”
     Then, she made a point that was radical at the time.      “Many homosexuals lead useful lives and enrich society through their creative efforts,” she wrote. “A person so afflicted, if he behaves in a socially acceptable manner, should not be insulted or snubbed.”
     It was the first time she had addressed the topic in almost six years on the job, and the response was enormous. The Sun-Times ran a page.
     “I am thoroughly disgusted with you,” a reader from Cleveland wrote. “The idea of a woman of your position standing up for queers!”
     “Your column about homosexuals was like a beacon of light in a dark world,” a reader from Los Angeles wrote.

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Inside John Deere Harvester Works: Think your iPhone is cutting-edge? Try driving an X9 combine.

     You know how some guys are about visiting ballparks around the country? They'll go to, oh, Baltimore, just so they can put a Camden Yards notch on their belt. I've always been like that about publications. I still like to add a new scalp. Particularly a publication like Crain's Chicago Business, a first rate, must-read title. 

     It helps that I really, really enjoy visiting factories — I can't think of another journalist in Chicago who makes a habit of that — and have been itching to get to John Deere, a mere 170 miles west of here. I loved every aspect of this story, both immersing myself in the company lore and rich history of a vastly cool cultural icon. I loved figuring out how to present the complicated manufacture process. 

     It was difficult, when Crain's posted the original 3200-word story two weeks ago, not to post the first graph here and then link to their site. I wanted to crow. But they have a solid paywall, and it didn't seem fair to catch your interest and then frustrate you.

     Besides, I knew the Sun-Times would be running an abbreviated, 2100-word version. To pull off that double play, honestly, took some gymnastics. Running a big article in a competitor and then a version in our own paper is not exactly standard operating procedure. But fortune favors the bold, and it seems to have worked. This is running in Sunday's paper, and I am, in theory, free to do more work for Crain's, provided all involved have a chance to sign off.

     Enough prelude. I hope this is half as fun to read as it was to write:

     Don’t be fooled by the miles of grain blurring into one endless field as you blast by on Interstate 88.
     Those stalks might all look the same to you. But farm equipment today can perceive each individual plant and know which one’s a crop, which is a weed.
     A John Deere combine rattling across Gaesser Farms in Ankeny, Iowa, can recognize which type of grain is being harvested and consider the direction of the wind and the slope of the ground to orient itself with far more precision than the smartphone in your pocket can tell you where you’re standing.

     GPS will place your phone’s location to within a couple of feet. But a modern combine triangulates the signal with even greater accuracy.
      ”We apply everything within one inch of where it’s supposed to be,” said Chris Gaesser, who farms 5,400 acres.
     Such precision is necessary if you want to, say, spray herbicide on weeds but not on the dirt between them. A farm generates data faster than it generates alfalfa after a rain. Both must be handled properly to keep everything running smoothly.
     If your image of a farmer is a man in overalls and a straw hat driving a tractor, daydreaming of peach cobbler, welcome to 2023. A modern farmer is more likely to be making phone calls and checking the number of “likes” on his latest #FarmTok post while the combine drives itself.
     He doesn’t have much choice.

     ”You’re sitting in this thing 16 hours a day, many times in the fall, this is the farmer’s office,” said Jason Abbott, manager of value realization at the John Deere Harvester Works. “Think about it that way. You have to not only run your machine efficiently and productively, in many cases you have to run your business while you’re in the machine.”
     City drivers are so dazzled by their shiny new hybrid vehicles’ traffic-sign recognition and 360-degree bird’s-eye view they might not realize that the same artificial intelligence revolution has revolutionized farming and the way farm equipment is manufactured.
     ”The tech adoption in agriculture would absolutely shock people that aren’t in the loop,” said Miles Musick, factory engineering manager at the Harvester Works, about 170 miles west of Chicago in East Moline, Illinois.
     Spend a morning at the 3 million-square-foot Harvester Works, and you get a sense of how high-tech it’s all become. When a Deere factory opened in the city in 1912, it already was toward the end of the company’s first century. The company was started in Grand Detour, Illinois, in 1837 by John Deere, a Vermont blacksmith who turned an old saw blade into a self-scouring steel plow that did a better job of cutting through Illinois’ sticky black earth.

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‘Stop the steal’ isn’t a new lie

     When someone learns where I work, they sometimes will fix me a sympathetic look and coo, “How is the paper doing?” Nodding with anticipation, they clearly expect me to share some tale of woe. Ready, it seems, to pat my hand sympathetically, if not give me a supportive hug after I burst out weeping.
     And not without reason. We are still in the age of the Great Newspaper Die-Off, where journalistic brachiosauruses regularly roll their eyes and collapse to the ground with a thundering crash.
     So it surprises them when I reply that the paper is doing great, really getting my back into that word, Tony the Tiger fashion: “grrreat!” Their faces betray disbelief and perhaps a little disappointment, the way you would react to news that Nana, 96, has checked herself out of hospice and gone on a Carnival Cruise to Antigua.
     But it’s true. The Chicago Newspaper Guild recently signed a three-year contract that, unlike past contracts, is not a full-face slap. There are raises. I can’t speak for anyone else on our burgeoning staff — they’re also hiring — but for me, it’s like being about to surrender to the icy chop, closing my salt-crusted eyes for the last time upon this storm-tossed world, only to open them later to find myself blinking in a bright stateroom, being dried off with fluffy towels as hot broth is spooned into my mouth.
     There’s also new equipment. The tech folks told me to come get my new laptop, even though the old Apple, circa 2012, still works. I almost argued. The long-established rule at the paper is, you can’t get a fresh pencil until you turn in the stub of the old one.
     First, I was instructed to go over the old laptop, removing my files. The laptop, with me from Tokyo to Tierra del Fuego, had thousands of photos. Instead of just transferring them, I saw a chance to cull.

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Don't be afraid, it's just a book...

     We can take living in Illinois for granted, as an oasis from the revanchist madness gripping parts of the nation. For instance, on Monday, the state banned book bans.
     "Book bans are about censorship; marginalizing people, marginalizing ideas and facts," Gov. J. B. Pritzker said, stating the quiet part out loud. "Regimes ban books, not democracies."
     Illinois was the first state in the country to pass a law cutting funding to any library that restricts books because of "partisanal or doctrinal" disapproval. And while the devil is in the details, it means that any censorious individual can't count on the state as an eager partner if they get bent out of shape because a book acknowledges the existence of LGBTQ people, or goes into America's racist past in detail that makes them uncomfortable. They'll just have to be satisfied with not checking out books they don't like, instead of pretending those books are dangerous for everybody, and forcing their narrow outlook on the entire community, a common practice in the red-tinted regions of the country.
     Books help, not hurt, as I was reminded Wednesday, when I introduced readers to Sara Bader's newest book on pet love and grief, mentioning a column, gulp, nearly 20 years ago, when I wrote about her first book.

HIDDEN IN PLAIN VIEW

     History once meant the lives of kings, which grew old before somebody had the bright idea to also look at the lives of common people: laborers and farmers and artisans. Suddenly we understood the past a little better.  

       Researcher Sara Bader has had a similar insight, realizing that she could learn an awful lot about the past through old classified ads, and her lovely new book, Strange Red Cow, is an illuminating delight. She uses classifieds, mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries, to riff from the whimsical to the heartbreaking, from ads for lost livestock (the title comes from a plea, beginning, "Came to my plantation . . . A STRANGE RED COW . . .") to ads for runaway slaves ("RUN away from the Subscriber, on Saturday the 1st Instant, a Negro Woman named JUDITH, who carried her Child with her. . . .").
     Bader discovered that if you, for instance, are wondering what people kept in their saddlebags in 1777, you could find out by consulting the advertisement of someone who lost two between Worcester and Hardwick ("Lost . . . a pair of SADDLE BAGS containing a Cheese, some pulled Sheeps Wool, a number of Apples, a striped small Apron, and a small pair of blue Stockings . . ."). She writes well, too.

     "We can untie the twine that once wrapped up their parcels, rifle through satchels, empty out coat pockets," she writes, in the lucid commentary surrounding the old ads. "That our collective ancestors forgot their books in carriages, left their capes on battlefields, and dropped their keys and their cash is oddly reassuring."
     Like classifieds, the book is divided into subject headings "Help Wanted," "Lost and Found," "Swap." You'll learn things you never thought of before -- how after the Civil War, former slaves took out poignant ads in the black press, searching for their lost children -- and you will never look at the classified section of the newspaper in the same way again.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times Dec. 26, 2005

‘The one gift we cannot give’

     “How many summers does a little dog have?” poet Mary Oliver asks in her 2013 collection, “Dog Songs.” I usually mark lines that strike me with a Post-It note. Here there was no need. I carried it away, indelible as a tattoo.
     The question, well, I almost said it haunts me. But that’s over-dramatic. The question sits there like an unwelcome visitor in a waiting room, briefcase jammed with sorrow on its knees, looking around impatiently, tapping the face of its wristwatch.
     I thought of the line again recently, meeting Bella, a Bichon mix, like my Kitty. In front of the Northbrook Public Library. She was very thin and shaky and clearly not long for this world.
     “How old?” I asked, the usual dogwalker’s question, freighted with more than the usual significance.
     “Eighteen,” the owner, a lady about my age, replied.
     Kitty is 13. So five years. Relief. And concern. How fast does five years go? Will it be more? Or less? How many summers does a little dog have?
     In the past, when I thought of Kitty’s ultimate end, I sought shelter in a facile line. “I’m hoping to go before she does.” Now that seems too glib. Some pains demand anticipation. Luckily, pet owners now have a whole book to prepare and brace us: “The Book of Pet Love & Loss: Words of Comfort & Wisdom from Remarkable People,” by Sara Bader, a gorgeous volume intended to both celebrate our love of companion animals and bring solace when bereavement comes.
     “How do we make sense of the desolation that sets in so quickly?” the author asks.

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