Works in progress: "Good for somethin': A Twitter Tale"

     Writing for publication is hard. I sometimes forget that, because writing for publication is about all I do. But this Saturday feature, Works in Progress reminds me. Even professional writers can have a tough time with it — I had a pal whom I asked to write a single sentence about a current project. Just one; I'd fill in the rest. The pal phoned me, genuinely panicked, stuck. Couldn't get a handle on it. I of course replied there was no need. But it was surprising. Then again, I've always had the gift of facileness. Or maybe the curse.

     So it didn't surprise me when the Saturday "Works in Progress" spot began to go unfilled. Until this week, when there were two offerings — it never rains, it pours. One, from a fiction writer, went into the weeds over a comment on the Tylenol killings column, and I decided the matter had been aired enough. 
     But this, by perennial reader Jakash, I'm happy to share. "Jakash" isn't his real name; he asked if I could preserve the fig leaf of anonymity. It IS daunting, to hang your identity out there — another reality that often flies past me. Sure, I said, why not? Take it away, Jakash:

     Almost exactly a year ago, my wife and I were taking a casual Saturday stroll through one of the non-descript parts of Lakeview in Chicago. As we walked south on Ravenswood, we noticed workers on scaffolding taking the siding off a building near Addison. Crossing to the south side of the street, by Dunkin Donuts, we turned back to see that an old advertisement was being revealed as the siding was pulled off: "Ward's Soft Bun Bread," certainly unfamiliar to us. My wife took a photo of the partially uncovered sign, and we figured we'd come back later to see more.
     Everybody knows that Twitter has its problems. More so since having been picked up at the bargain price of $44 billion by that emerald-encrusted champion of free speech, Elon Musk. (It was recently characterized by our genial host in the Sun-Times as "a toxic hellscape run poorly by a right-wing South African egomaniac..." Personally, I never signed up for it, since a) I realized that it would be a huge time sink and b) I'm not really what you'd call a joiner. 

     However, enough people I respect are on it that I've haphazardly sought out maybe a dozen  accounts. Looking at just those is also a time sink, of course, but not to the extent of becoming the time drain it could if I were actually participating.
     At any rate, many of the folks I follow are local history, architecture, infrastructure or nature-minded Tweeters who are frequently posting interesting ephemera or more significant news about under-reported goings-on in the city. I knew from them that the sign we'd seen was a ghost sign, i.e., a sign painted on a building that used to advertise something which has either been blocked from view by a newer building, or covered up by renovations. 

     "The ghost sign people are gonna love this!" I thought. 

      Since the corner of Addison and Ravenswood is not exactly in an uncharted wilderness, I figured I'd be seeing tweets about it soon. So, I waited, checking my usual suspects each day, pretty sure that if anybody posted photos of this sign, they would go viral, at least among the select group of like-minded Chicagoans. 

      We saw the workers on Saturday morning, July 9. By Tuesday evening, still nothing to indicate that the building had been discovered. I felt people were missing a treat, and figured I had 3 options: a) keep waiting. b) Join Twitter and post about the sign myself. Or c) pick somebody that I followed and hope that he'd visit the location and put it on his timeline, to then be seen by others. 

      I went with the third option. That night I decided to email Robert Loerzel, a journalist and photographer whom I consider the King of Local Twitter (editor's note: he is correct. Robert Loerzel is indeed the King of Local Twitter). He has over 20,000 followers and maintains a very robust and interesting timeline, thriving in the midst of the hellscape.

     I was pretty sure he'd be interested in this sign. Alas, for whatever reason, he didn't jump at the chance to visit the site and I went back to waiting for somebody else to stumble upon it.
     By the following Sunday, still nothing about this building. I couldn't believe it. Especially since we'd gone back and there were a number of other ghost signs now uncovered on the north side of the building. I knew from looking at his interesting Twitter account that Bill Savage, a professor at Northwestern and a lover of local historical minutiae (and literature) (and baseball) (and bicycling) (and...) (editor's note: and hot dogs, and editor of my Chicago memoir) sometimes rode his bike on Damen Ave., which is two blocks away from Ravenswood. I thought perhaps he might make a slight detour sometime if he was riding by to see the signs. So I emailed four photos to him, specifying the location. 

     That worked. Within hours, he had stopped by, taken several of his own photos (much better than ours) and posted the news of these ghost signs to Twitter.
     And from there, it was off to the races. They were quite popular, among the people who find something like that appealing. Bill's tweet went viral in a low-key, non-Obama version of viral. (No doubt assisted in this regard by being retweeted by Robert Loerzel...) The signs were reported about and photographed by Colin Boyle on the news website Block Club Chicago and even made the TV news. Many folks took their own pictures and posted them. We had thought the building would most likely be torn down within a week. But the signs stayed up for over a month. People who are interested in preserving such historic material got involved and proceeded to painstakingly remove them. "Local experts dated the ads to the late 1920s and early ’30s," Colin Boyle wrote on Block Club. "They were painted directly onto wood panels as opposed to the common practice of painting onto brick, adding to their rarity.
     The moral of this tale is that Twitter contains multitudes. It's not just a free-fire zone for anybody with a wacky conspiracy theory to promote. There are a lot of folks who use it as the most efficient way to broadly share information. Though currently I don't even look at it, because Elon Musk, flashing his galaxy-brained brilliance, has decided that you must sign up in order to browse tweets now. And pay, if you want to enjoy certain features of the site. He's talked in the past about his wish for it to be a virtual town square, but doesn't seem to recognize the disconnect when it comes to his desire that people should pay one of the richest men on Earth in order to step onto the village green.
     Anyway, it was quite enjoyable for my wife and me to see what happened once this discovery became better known, and the signs ended up in good hands. As for the "Wards Soft Bun Bread" sign that we originally glimpsed? It's now in the possession of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/07/19/rare-decades-old-ghost-signs-revealed-on-ravenswood-building-facing-demolition/
https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/08/12/rare-lakeview-ghost-signs-saved-just-days-before-demolition-thanks-to-donations/

Enjoying life immensely at 109

 

Edith Renfrow Smith in 2022

   Happy birthday to you, Edith Renfrow Smith!
     While this column is not typically directed toward one specific individual, Ms. Smith, who turns 109 years old Friday, is no typical individual.
     Readers might recall her incredible story from two years ago, on her 107th birthday — she was the first Black graduate of Grinnell College. Class of ’37, who came to Chicago, where she became secretary to Oscar DePriest, Chicago’s first Black alderman. Future jazz great Herbie Hancock lived across the street, and taught her daughter to play “Chopsticks.”
     When Ms. Smith turned 108, we revisited, and were rewarded with sound advice (“This is a wonderful world and you need to take care of it”) and a jar of her homemade raspberry jelly. I figured, if turning 107 and 108 were noteworthy, how could 109 not be?
     Besides, I was curious: How’s she doing?
     “Oh, I’m just fine,” said Ms. Smith. “I’ve been doing fine.”
     I apologized for not visiting in person, as in previous years. But I had unwisely put off reaching out until July, and by then COVID had settled in for a prolonged stay. She understood completely.
     “You go keep that to yourself,” she said. “I don’t want it. I don’t need it.”
     What Ms. Smith did not mention — and this might be a clue to how one gets to be 109 — is that she herself already had COVID, last May.
     “She didn’t have COVID like everybody else,” said her daughter, Alice Frances Smith. “She was in the hospital for something else. They tested her, and the day she left, the doctor said, ‘You know she has COVID.’ And I said, ‘No, no one told me.’ My mother didn’t have a fever. She had nothing. That was her big excitement for the year.”

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A hot time below the old town

  

Under City Hall

     As a subscriber to the New York Times, it's interesting to see how that paper always gets Chicago just slightly wrong.
    Take the story on the front page Wednesday, "Heat Down Below is Making the Ground Shift Under Chicago," which begins, "Underneath downtown Chicago's soaring Art Deco towers..."
     Stop right there. Is there anyone familiar with Chicago who thinks of the city first as a place of "soaring Art Deco towers"? I hope not. I mean, we have them. The gilt-topped Carbide and Carbon Building comes to mind. But our most famous deco-era skyscraper, the Tribune Tower, isn't really "deco" at all, in a design sense, but a monstrous 1920s gothic cathedral pastiche rearranged into a high-rise.
     And the most purely deco building in Chicago, if you ask me, is the Rockefeller Center knock-off NBC Tower, finished in 1989. 
     The story is of the "professor publishes a study" genus, extending climate change to the earth below our feet. In the 20th century, "the ground between the city surface and the bedrock has warmed by 5.6 degrees Fahrenheit on average."
     As to the significance of this, there is talk of unpleasant subway conditions and "tiny shifts in the ground beneath buildings, which can induce structural strain." But if the city's buildings are actually sinking and cracking, that part was left out.
     The article is based on a paper, "The silent impact of underground climate change on civil infrastructure" by Alessandro F. Rotto Loria, an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern, published Tuesday in the journal Communications Engineering. 
     The Times story is written well enough, and climate reporter Raymond Zhong gamely accompanies the professor on a tour of the white temperature sensor boxes placed underground around downtown. Perhaps the most interesting fact, deep in the story, is the CTA wouldn't permit the sensors to be placed in its stations because they were worried that passengers might see them and think they're bomb detonators.
    Otherwise, the thing struck me as something of an oversell, given its page one placement. The ground is shifting, but the buildings seem unaffected. It should have taken the next step, and reported all the cracks and crumbling foundations, if they exist. My guess is, the buildings are designed to tolerate slight shifts. 
     Given the national shame being poured on Northwestern at the moment, thanks to its football hazing scandal, for one moment I wondered if this wasn't something rushed into print, trying to provide a positive light for the old purple and white — look, we have this important study! But that's conspiratorial thinking. Sometimes random events just line up.

Tylenol killings and the mystery of murder

Voodoo figurines, The Field Museum

     Domestic terrorism is a young man’s game. I have no idea why. You’d think it would be the other way around — old men, having lived most of their lives, tempted to go out in a blaze of imagined glory for whatever grudge is stuck in their wrinkly craws.
     But no. It’s the young who pitch away others’ lives, and their own, too, for what always amounts to nothing.
     Take the idiot who shot up the 4th of July parade in Highland Park last year. He was 21. You shouldn’t include the killer in the circle of sympathy, but I do think about that guy, sitting in jail, night after night. For the rest of his life. What must he be thinking? Maybe if you’re the kind of person who could do something like that, you don’t have the usual human feelings you’d expect to find in a person.
     Timothy McVeigh was 26 when he blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children in a day care center. He was executed in 2001; McVeigh is as eloquent an argument for the death penalty as I can imagine. Yes, it’s sometimes administered unjustly in an overburdened and racist criminal justice system. But some crimes cry out for it.
     Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was a little older — his first bomb exploded, at Northwestern University, two days after his 36th birthday. Living in a cabin in Montana, he conducted his bombing campaign — 16 bombs over 17 years — while the government fruitlessly tried to track him down, distributing a drawing from a witness who saw him at a post office, a man in sunglasses and a hoodie. It wasn’t much help; his brother ended up turning him in, after recognizing the style of the writing in the rambling manifesto he forced two newspapers to print.
     Kaczynski died in June, a suicide — finally hurting someone who deserved it — bringing up his crimes all over again. The media is funny that way. We only need a pretext, a transition, any excuse to unspool the tale once again. “Tylenol? Funny you should mention that....”
     I guess the justification is that some people don’t know.

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The Tylenol killings

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     James Lewis, the only suspect in the 1982 Tylenol killings, was found dead at his home in Boston Sunday. Anyone who was around the Chicago area remembers just how frightening these random murders were. I describe them in my recent book, "Every Goddamn Day," published by the University of Chicago Press. 

Sept. 29, 1982 

     “Mary, are you okay?” 

     Dennis Kellerman hovers by the bathroom door. He saw his 12-year-old daughter go inside. Then a thud. 

    She had woken up feeling unwell—a scratchy throat—and her parents said she could stay home from school. Her dad knocks again. “Mary, are you okay?” 

     He opens the door. It’s about 7 a.m. 

     Adam Janus, 27, an Arlington Heights postal worker, is also staying home with a cold. At noon he picks up his children from preschool and stops by Jewel to grab some medicine. He goes home and has lunch.

      “I’m going to take two Tylenol and lie down,” he says.

      About 3:45 in Winfield, Mary Reiner is home with her four children, the youngest a week old. Her husband comes home to find her collapsed on the floor. 

     An hour later, the family of Adam Janus is planning his funeral. His brother, Stanley, who has a bad back, asks his wife to get him something. She takes two red-and-white capsules for him from a bottle in the bathroom. And two for herself. He takes them. And so does she. He crumples to the floor. She does too. 

     At 6:30 p.m., Mary McFarland is at work, at an Illinois Bell store in Lombard. She has a headache. . . . 

     Arlington Heights public health nurse Helen Jensen is called in to help figure out what is going on. She goes to the Janus house, where she sees the bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol. She takes it with her to Northwest Community Hospital, where doctors and police are frantically puzzling over what is happening.

      “Maybe it’s the Tylenol,” she says, setting the bottle down. 

     They phone the Cook County medical examiner’s office. Edmund Donoghue tells them to smell the bottle. They do. Almonds. A strong scent. The telltale odor of cyanide. Johnson & Johnson yanks the drug from shelves the next morning. Police drive slowly down residential streets, in that pre-internet age, using loudspeakers to warn residents not to take the popular painkiller. A few days later, all Tylenol bottles—31 million of them, worth $100 million—are recalled. 

     Seven people die in the Tylenol murders. There will also be hundreds of copycat crimes—acid in eye drops, strychnine in capsules. From now on, medicines will come in bottles with tamper-proof caps, or blister packs. A man will be convicted of trying to extort $1 million from Johnson & Johnson, but no one is ever charged with the killings.

Don’t let RFK Jr. kill you

     Lucky that I never thought of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as anything other than a crank. Because now I don’t have to die.
    It was a week ago Friday that my wife got sick. Her doctor sent us to a walk-in clinic for the more advanced COVID test. She suggested I get tested, too — I had a cough. I almost said no but was trying to be agreeable: OK, fine, whatever, honey. Swab me too, doc.
     My wife had strep. And I had both strep and COVID.
     Guess that pandemic isn’t over quite yet.
     Were I, like Kennedy, lost in a paranoid fantasy bordering on pure hallucination, I could offer my getting COVID after five, count ‘em, five, vaccinations as proof they don’t work.
     Except vaccinations don’t guarantee you won’t get an illness, just greatly decrease your odds of getting sick, and, if you do, boost your chance of having a milder case. They’re like seatbelts — you can still get killed in a crash. Seatbelts just skew the chances of survival greatly in your favor.
     In fact, for the first miserable week, the strep was worse — thank you Paxlovid! Swallowing felt like gobbling rusty gravel. But that passed, and COVID tag teamed into the ring and hit me with a folding chair.
     COVID feels like ... what? Exhaustion and a deep bronchial cough, the Hulk squeezing you like a dog’s rubber squeak toy until you wheeze out every last cubic centimeter of air in your lungs and a bit, ah, that is not air.
     Thanks to vaccines and Paxlovid, I endured a faint shadow of what I’d go through without them, my heart going out to Americans who died alone in some crowded hospital because they took the anti-medical balderdash of Kennedy et al seriously. Who died croaking out their fealty to Trump.

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Flashback 1997: Northwestern majors in sucking up money

     Never let it be said that Northwestern doesn't keep alumni on their toes. It's almost as if we have to be continually punished for whatever tattered shred of pride we try to retain from our association with the place by enduring a constant series of public humiliations perpetrated by an endless chain of privileged students and brain dead administrators who, well, to be kind, just aren't very good at this whole college thing. 
     I was reading the latest football hazing sex scandal in the Daily Northwestern and what one player term the "really abrasive and barbaric culture" that head coach Pat Fitzgerald, who has been suspended pending the obligatory slap on the wrist, apparently tolerated. After I collected my jaw off the floor and finished shaking my head — how could they have not gotten the memo? — I thought about the 40 plus years since graduation, and all the other hazing scandals, fraternity outrages, and academic humiliations that emanated from Evanston. From the two students killed while drunkenly doing pushups in Sheridan Road to the two students expelled for breaking into Alice Millar Chapel and defacing it with homophobic graffiti... 

      There are so many, it's hard to settle on a favorite. I've written about a number, and was looking for my column on NU's notorious fucksaw sex ed class. But maybe blushing Sun-Times librarians never archived it. Anyway, I ended up with this column, perhaps my first in the Sun-Times to nostalgically consider my old school, back in the days when the prime embarrassment associated with Northwestern was how much the place charges. Good times. (Oh, and tuition has almost tripled since then). 

     Someday Northwestern University will do something academically that makes big headlines. Research maybe. Until that day arrives, it has the yearly tuition jolt to keep the old purple and white in public view.

     Say it out loud. "Twenty-two thousand, three hundred and ninety-two dollars." A lot of money. In a time of single-digit inflation, Northwestern is planning a 16.9 percent tuition increase for freshmen and transfer students. And they say greed is dead.
     That doesn't even include room and board, which is about another $6,700.
     I'd call NU and get the precise room and board figure. But my years of reporting have taught me that NU has the most sluggish media relations department in all of Chicago academia. The University of Chicago will send you a cake with the information you're looking for written on the top in frosting before NU calls you back. So say $6,700, for a yearly tab of about 30 grand.
     That, of course, is the full sticker price and, like the sticker prices of automobiles, it is negotiable. Only the academically challenged spawn of wealthy families pony up the full fare. Everybody else hustles for financial relief.
     When I enrolled at Northwestern, almost 20 years ago, tuition was nearly $5,400 - but it might as well have been $54,000 or $540,000 because my family could never pay it. Only by cobbling together a scanty fig leaf of scholarships, grants, work study, summer jobs and federal loans did we just manage to cover the obscene figure.
     It wasn't worth it. If I seem somewhat testy about NU, it is because, in my four years there, I became unalterably convinced that the school is primarily not an educational institution, but a big money machine, designed to perpetuate itself, build more god-awful concrete campus structures, dandle rich alumni and leech capital from them.
     Guilty about having such hard feelings toward my old alma mater, I phoned a former classmate and close friend from those days and asked if she would be disturbed to see NU cast in a bad light.
     "I have no good feelings toward the school at all because they didn't do anything," she said. "I'm thinking particularly of Medill (the journalism school). They had no interest in the students. Just none."
     Sounds right to me. I phoned another classmate, who surprised me by refusing to say anything about the school, as if it were a horror beyond words.
     Maybe I hung out with the wrong crowd.
     Also, the late 1970s and early 1980s weren't exactly the glory years for the school. Students were being housed in the gym. The football team won only one game in the four years I was there. When friends asked if I was going to the Rose Bowl to see NU, I told them that I hadn't attended any games while a student, and it was too late to start now.
     Then there was the president, during my years a joyless businessman named Robert H. Strotz, whom I saw in person on precisely two occasions during my time there — the first day of school freshman year, when he spoke to the incoming class, and at graduation.
     It's not that the NU education was bad. I had, in my four years, perhaps 10 teachers whom I really liked and admired and learned from.
     Looking back at it from a distance, considering the enormous outlay of capital, considering the decade of loan payments that followed, I can't help but wonder if I would have been better off going to Ohio State free, or traveling the world, or starting a business, or doing almost anything else than attending Northwestern.
     But Ohio State seemed a grim gulag, with its giant, Stalinesque dorms, and I felt I deserved better. In that sense, private schools such as NU are like luxury cars. They emphasize their amenities, their powerful engines, burled walnut dashboards, and such. But the fact is that a car is a car, basically, and a $15,000 one will get you there the same way a $50,000 one will.
     The difference is that luxury cars cost more, and everybody knows it. Prestige always costs money. Drivers of Jaguars and holders of NU diplomas have proved that they can pay the piper.
     In that sense, I guess, why not grab for the luxury if you can somehow swing it? Just as the parking valet doesn't know if you're leasing that Mercedes or own it outright, so the prospective employers won't know if you paid full fare for NU or got a scholarship, whether you sat around your frat sipping morning beers or actually studied hard.
     And who knows? Maybe NU has gotten better in the last 15 years. It better have. They're charging enough for it.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 6, 1997