One sign, two people

     Forty years is a long time for two people to hang around each other. And while I’d never claim that their minds start to run on parallel, even identical tracks, well, maybe I should just describe what happened today.
     So my wife and I are driving to spend the weekend with friends. And we’re a little early, with time to kill. So we stop by Potawatomi State Park, to hike for an hour.
     At one point, we pass the sign above, and I turn to read it as we walk by: “Please carry out your trash.” And I instinctively consider making a joke about it. But I immediately shake off the idea — no man should suggest that his wife is trash — preferring to smile inwardly than to air the joke and risk causing offense. Shutting up is an art for that requires constant practice.
     But even as I am silently basking in my triumph over the weisenheimer impulse, my wife stops, turns, takes a step toward me, reaches out, grabs my elbows and lifts.
     “What are you doing?” I ask, knowing the answer.
     “Trying to pick you up,” she replies, with a wicked smile.

No more ridiculous than golf

Rey Kadon took this shot of the Miller High Life 400 in Brooklyn, New York, in 1989.
“Who wouldn’t have fun on a charter bus with a bunch of your coworkers and kegs of beer?” he recalled.

     An apology is in order.
     I’m so inured with the toxic free-fire zone that pops up around controversial issues, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that most people are decent and sensible. When I invited readers Wednesday to write in explaining the allure of NASCAR, I didn’t really expect that people would then actually, you know, write in explaining the allure of NASCAR.
     But that’s exactly what they did — wrote thoughtful, often heartfelt reflections and celebrations of the sport. So as much as I like to flit nimbly from topic to topic, it felt wrong to just ignore them. So here goes.
     Neal Elkind finds beauty in the races, writing:
     “NASCAR has more in common with watching baseball than maybe you may realize. It’s a wonderfully lazy spectator sport. It’s auto racing perfected (in its traditional oval) as a spectator sport. ... The strategy of cars maneuvering for position and the use of aerodynamics. F1 and Indy, you only see cars whooshing by for 1 second (like watching competitive downhill skiing in person). The noise, which is astounding, and motion, is hypnotic. Like baseball, it’s pastoral. Really. You can wander off to the concessions for 15 minutes (or, a whole inning) and not feel that you’ve missed anything. The crowds tend to be families that do not fight or swear in the stands. I could go on about how this race shows the beauty of our city’s lakefront to a whole new audience.”
     Doug Nichols traced the appeal of racing back to antiquity:
     “There are the funeral games held by Achilles to honor Patroclus. Among other sports, the games featured a chariot and a foot race. Centuries later, the chariot racing in Constantinople’s hippodrome was important to the social fabric.”

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Lost at sea

              "Ocean Life," by James M. Sommerville (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Has anyone credited the Titanic with five more victims? I can't be the first. Maybe they're waiting until the theoretical air supply runs out on the on the Titan, the deep diving submersible lost Sunday in a voyage to the bottom of the sea to ogle the famous wreck.

     Waiting a polite span of time.

     I'm taken by the respectful air of restrained solemnity with which the media greeted the disappearance of the 22-foot-long submersible craft that vanished at the start of its nearly two and a half mile plunge to get up close and personal with the wreckage of the Titanic.
     Five passengers spent nearly a million dollars, collectively, to gaze at the sunken vessel through a thick porthole (though perhaps not thick enough, according to a former employee, who complained five years ago that the craft, run by OceanGate Expeditions, was not safe).
     While it's sad when anyone died, the pointlessness of the endeavor should also be remarked upon. Yes, the Titanic continues to fascinate more than a century after famously sinking on its maiden voyage. I've written about the allure. 

     At least that trip was transportation, getting from Point A to Point B, albeit in style. This latest fatal jaunt was just a lark, without any practical, scientific or aesthetic justification. At least when you go into space, you see the curve of the earth, the blackness of the cosmos. I'm not sure why you'd go to the great expense and obvious danger of setting eyes upon the corroded ruin of the Titanic. To see the thing? To say you did it? What?
     The ocean is vast, and my hunch is the Titan will never be found. My friends were already talking about the movie that will be made from the disappearance, but I just can't envision it. Particularly because the most likely scenario — some part gave way, the intense pressure of the ocean crushed the submersible like an egg, and they were all dead within two seconds — does not lend itself to drama.

     And I'll make another prediction— interest in this kind of thing will soar, not suffer. People with more money than sense will learn about the possibilities and become intrigued, ignoring the "and then you might die" part.
     One of the victims — if that is the proper term for someone who willingly puts themselves in that much danger — was 19 years old. A true tragedy. If he really wanted an incredible adventure, he should have stayed on dry land and lived his ordinary life.

People pay for that?

     So NASCAR. The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, roaring around downtown Chicago in less than two weeks.
     A nightmare I’ve come to think of as “Lori’s Revenge.”
     We’ve all read about it. The course. The disruption. Taste of Chicago booted from its traditional perch. Not only this summer, but for two more to come. Nowhere near the epic proportions of Rich Daley’s flush-billions-down-the-toilet-for-the-next-75-years blunder. But quite a commitment to expensive folly nevertheless.
     And, pardon me for asking, is Lori Lightfoot even going? Or has the former mayor already decamped to Cambridge, where she sits at a window, tapping a pencil against a yellow legal pad. Puffing out her cheeks. Gathering her thoughts. About leadership ...
     Sorry. So Monday, with June suddenly two-thirds over, I began looking ahead, and had this thought: “Maybe I should go to see NASCAR.”

     Stock car racing is a bedrock American sport — 10th place, anyway, behind pro wrestling and tennis. I’ve gone downtown to witness what I imagined was a comparable event — the Chicago Marathon — to cheer my brother when he ran. Masses of onlookers craning for a glimpse. Not the most enjoyable time — I never did catch sight of him among the lank bundles of sinew loping past. But not a bad way to spend the day, either. It wasn’t as if it cost anything.
     I assumed going to see the NASCAR race would be something similar. Hop off at Union Station, stroll down Adams. Eyeball some stock cars roaring around a curve. Snap a few photos for social media. Watch for, oh, half an hour, until you get the point — vroom vroom. Then go find lunch.
     I plunged into the Internet and quickly found the City of Chicago’s Ticket Options page.

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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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