Flashback 1994: "Kup Hosts 50th Cruise for Vets"

     Tony Bennett died Friday, at age 96. "The last of the great saloon singers of the mid-20th century," in the words of the Associated Press. A thorough pro with a surprising second act — he is the oldest living performer with a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart in 2014, his "Cheek to Cheek" collection of duets with Lady Gaga.

     National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian
          gift of Everett Raymond Kinstler

     Of course I thought of the time he stood six feet away from me and sang, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," and dug out the story that describes the circumstances — the 50th cruise that Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet held for wounded vets. 

    I didn't mention it — I probably didn't know at the time — but Bennett himself was a vet, having served as a teenager in the U.S. Army in World War II, given "a front seat to hell," as he later described it, and was among the American soldiers who liberated Dachau. 

     Once again, the forgotten men and women gathered. Once again, from lonely hospital wards and modest apartments, they came, on crutches, in wheelchairs and under their own power, on prosthetic limbs and shrapnel-scarred legs.
     All were guests of Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet, who on Wednesday, for the 50th year in a row, hosted his Purple Heart Cruise in honor of wounded veterans from American wars both recent and long past.
     "Welcome, welcome," said Kup, shaking the hand of each vet who boarded the Spirit of Chicago, piped aboard by a 25-piece Navy band and given a tote bag filled with presents.
     The ship, escorted by a Chicago Police Department boat and saluted by a quartet of fountaining water cannons from a fireboat, spent nearly six hours cruising Lake Michigan, up the lakefront, almost to Evanston.
     The 600 veterans spent the time eating, dancing, playing cards and remembering the battles they fought in, the medals they won, the wounds they suffered.
     Some of the wounds were readily apparent.
     "I had a grenade blow off my hand," said Joe Kostyk, almost cheerily, displaying his right hand, missing its thumb and two fingers. "It surprised the heck out of me."
     Some of the wounds were harder to see.
     "Post-traumatic stress," said Jerry Gillespie, 45, who served in the infantry in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970. "I have the nightmares, the flashbacks. All that. It was a hell of a war."
     Donald P. Blaesing played hooky from his pain clinic to go on the cruise.
     Scheduled to go to Lakeside VA Hospital to seek relief from pain that continues 44 years after he was caught in a North Korean grenade attack, Blaesing, who was dubbed "the human sieve" by hospital workers, instead chose to cruise Lake Michigan.
     "It's enjoyable," said Blaesing. "You meet a lot of buddies."
     "It's great that Kupcinet does this every year," said Steve Glenn, 42, a former Navy avionics man. "All the guys coming back to the alcohol rehab from the cruise last year, they said it was the first time they had fun sober since they were kids."
     The group included one Medal of Honor winner, Richard Bush, who, in the best tradition of Marine heroes, was vague about what he did to win the military's highest prize.
     "I was in Okinawa," said Bush, tall and straight at 69. "I was just trying to do the best I could."
     Not all the talk was of the past. Petitions calling for the military cemetery at Fort Sheridan to be expanded into a national veterans cemetery were passed around for signatures.
     "I got an answer back from (President) Clinton," said Neil Iovino, 76, who spent three years in a Japanese POW camp. He wrote to the president about the cemetery. "He said he'd think about it."
     The highlight of the day was a visit by singer Tony Bennett, who slipped aboard when the ship docked at noon, escorted by broadcasting greats Harry Caray and Jack Brickhouse.
     After signing autographs, posing for pictures and shaking hands, Bennett sang, "I Want to Be Around" and "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."
     The day was to thank vets, but as it was the 50th voyage, gratitude was directed to Kup, as well.
     "I'm here to really thank Irv Kupcinet," said Mayor Daley, who went aboard to shake hands and greet vets. "Fifty years of the Purple Heart Cruise shows the type of citizen he is."
     Letters from the president and from retired Gen. Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were presented, as well as the Italian American War Veterans' first annual Bob Hope Award.
     "Without Kup, we'd be forgotten," said James Sarno. "Unless there's a war, nobody remembers the vet."

                   —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 28, 1994

Plenty of room in the tent

Kokie Childers

     A friend once asked me to help a sergeant he knew who was being released from active duty with the Marine Corps and needed to find a job. Which can be daunting under the best circumstances. But this particular jarhead was missing part of the left side of his face, including his left eye.
     I wanted to reply, “I can barely keep my own job, never mind get one for anybody else.” But that seemed craven. I said I’d do what I could.
     So I took sarge around, to City Club luncheons and such. We’d meet at restaurants to talk. At one point, I remember sitting across from him, wondering, “Is he getting better? Healing maybe?” Because his appearance, so unsettling when I first met him, now wasn’t as disturbing.
     I immediately realized why. His face was exactly the same as when we met. What happened was, I got used to him. He had become familiar.
     This came back to me last week when an advertisement popped up on Facebook for tank tops from Lululemon, the Canadian lifestyle brand.
     The model was not the standard issue cookie-cutter athletic type seen in such ads, but had large blotches on her face. This is nothing new. Benetton did something similar in the 1990s. Catalogues now have models who are heavy, or trans, or otherwise outside the supposed mainstream. I’m not the first to notice.
     “Classic models are by far more racially diverse,” the Washington Post observed in 2021. “Models are also more varied by ethnicity, size, age and disability ... In today’s fashion ecosystem, an amputee pinup pouts from the pages of a swimsuit calendar and a young woman with Down syndrome stars in a Gucci beauty campaign.”

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No beauty without flaw

     Your phone constantly slides advertisements under your nose as you navigate social media. Most flash by without a second thought. 

     But now and then a pitch gives pause, such as this one, from Hotels.com. I had been looking at airline tickets — I must fly to Phoenix next month, lucky me — and so clearly the algorithm wanted me to stay somewhere while I was there.

     Look at the ad. Does anything pop out at you? Do you see why I paused, thought, and took a picture?
     The dirt. It's like somebody upended a flower pot. Or what seems at first like dirt. On second glance, maybe that's the pattern on some kind of skin rug. It's hard to tell.

    Either way, not quite the pristine hotel room you typically see.
     I have a theory, one I plan to elaborate on in the newspaper Friday: advertisers are deliberately putting intriguing aberrations into their static commercial photos. I've noticed more models with vitiligo, with dense patches of freckles. They not only expand the circle of the acceptable, but they also make the viewer pause, maybe even investigate and buy. Which is the entire point.

    Or am I mistaken?

Will my Fresca kill me?

     Cancer is not the dreaded “c-word” death sentence of old. But the word still catches your attention. So when a division of the World Health Organization announced that aspartame, an artificial sweetener commonly found in diet soda, “could possibly cause cancer,” this can-a-day Fresca addict, of course, took notice.
     It would be the type of irony you expect in a topsy-turvy world — all those years of guzzling Jack Daniels, and Fresca does me in. Of course.
     I checked the ingredients of my beloved grapefruit-flavored carbonated beverage. Yup, aspartame.
     Then I went back to the article that had delivered the bad news — important to do now that we absorb scraps of information by scrolling, flipping and glancing — and kept reading. Seven paragraphs in, the threshold of danger, as explained by another WHO unit, is presented as consuming more than a dozen cans a day, for a 150-pound man. Or about 20 for me. Quite a lot, really. And I don’t even drink a Fresca every day. Some days I’m in a restaurant, and restaurants typically don’t serve Fresca, through some mysterious general menu exclusion. Or I splurge on lemonade.
     So I’m probably safe. In that regard.
     The process of balancing dangers, evaluating them, changing your behavior accordingly — what you do despite the peril, what you refuse, despite the benefits — doesn’t get a fraction of the attention it deserves. Like the computers we’re increasingly enslaved to, we’ve become creations of 0s or 1s, safe or dangerous, when most of life actually transpires in the great gray region between.

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Trump is a fascist who would destroy America

     “This is a crusade!" said Trump troll Stephen Bannon. "This is a Holy War against the Deep State! Donald Trump is our instrument for retribution!”
     If you haven't been paying attention — God, I envy you — then the past week has been a particularly grim news cycle. Publications such as the Economist and the New York Times outlined the meticulous efforts of Trump supporters to prepare for his second administration, a careful program of hobbling the government and concentrating power in Donald Trump's hands.
     You can read the Economist piece, "The meticulous, ruthless preparations for a second Trump term," here. And the NYT here (and stop whining about paywalls. Go the 7-Eleven and try to walk out with a can of Coke. Pay for stuff).
     The bad news is that the 2024 election is scarier than 2016 or 2020. Nobody expected Trump to win in 2016, least of all Trump, and he wasn't prepared to dismantle the institutional guardrails that kept him from going full-on totalitarian. Next time he will be. He had trouble attracting talent to help him, as many Republican operatives took a wait-and-see approach. Not this time — power not only corrupts, it attracts, and one of the most sickening aspects of the Trump experience is realizing just how many people are fine with him, if it means they get a slice of pie. They're busy preparing recipes to take full advantage of the next opportunity. 
     The good news is the situation is clear as day. Trump is a fascist. He is opposed to democracy because a majority of Americans are against him and the narrow religious bigotry he represents. So he must try to win by gaming the system — claiming a corrupt election, leading a coup against the Capitol, and dismantling the "Deep State" of institutional knowledge and democratic standards. Anyone who supports him is, knowingly or not, betraying the core values of American life. Period.

Fake abortion clinics ‘bigger than ever’

 

   I haven't done a lot of investigative pieces for the paper. But one of the very first stories I wrote for news side, back when I was still writing for the features section, was about fake abortion clinics, and involved me going around and visiting them, with the staffer from a pro-choice group posing as my girlfriend. That was 35 years ago, and it was disappointing — though not surprising — to find they're still a feature on the Chicago landscape. That's why I snapped at this when it came my way.

     Lizz Winstead was 17, a high school senior in Minnesota.
     “I was a Catholic teenager who found myself pregnant, making deals with God and myself,” said Winstead, now 61. “Pregnancy tests weren’t available.”
     There was no internet. She saw an advertisement on the side of a bus about free pregnancy tests. She went to the address, an old house, oddly.
     “I never forgot it,” she recalled. “There was a person in a lab coat, impersonating a doctor. She gave me a pregnancy test. It was positive, and she pulled out a book with all those pictures of bloody fetuses you see at protests outside clinics. She freaked me out.”
     Winstead had stumbled on one of the fake abortion clinics that anti-abortion activists run to lure in young women who fear they are pregnant, so they can be harangued about hellfire and the alleged horrors of a medical procedure far safer than carrying a pregnancy to term.
     Nor are these fake clinics a relic of the past — Illinois, despite being a blue peninsula of women’s rights jutting in an angry red lake of Midwestern religious intolerance, has three times as many sham abortion clinics as real ones.
     “They’re bigger than ever,” said Winstead, a comedian who went on to co-create “The Daily Show” and, in 2015, started a group that became the Abortion Access Front, which came to Chicago over the weekend to rally in front of one of Illinois’ 97 fake abortion clinics.

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The story right now

     As someone who mines his daily life for material, often of a truly insignificant nature — I wrote three columns in July, 2021 about picking up after dogs — I notice when I'm avoiding something that is actually quite a big deal, and pause to ask myself why.
     Usually I have good reason. The boys, for instance. I wrote about them for years and years. But they're not boys anymore — they're men, adults in their mid-20s, both lawyers, who are by nature circumspect. I want them to feel comfortable sharing information with me, and my not rushing the details of their lives into print, here, on Facebook, or anywhere else, seems part of that bargain. When one of them argues in front of the Supreme Court, or is appointed to it, I'll let you know.  If it's okay with them.
     Or COVID. I was diagnosed June 30, and while I've mentioned it a time or two, I decided to spare you the full range of particulars. Why? Being sick isn't that interesting, for starters. An off-putting mix of the squeamish and the dull, a variety of mundane symptoms like constant coughing, set into an empty day of exhausted langor. Plus I've seen older bloggers try to turn their medical woes into "Aida," and made a mental note to myself: don't do that.

     I did start a column this morning on the hideous side effects of Paxlovid, but liked it so much I thought I'd save it to run in the newspaper Wednesday — I've found myself still able to write, which is fortunate, if odd. I can be completely drained, sprawled on the sofa, a motiveless bag of skin, my mind a blank. Yet heave myself in front of the keyboard, the fire bell clangs, the old wagon horse stirs on its straw, and away we go. At least so far.

     Anything else? When my wife, who also has COVID was in the worst of it — and we seem to be trading off, back and forth, one sinking while the other improves and does the nursing  — and I was executing my caregiver duties, I came up with a term I feel could be worth putting into an empty bottle and tossing out onto the electronic waves: "chuppah sick."

     If you are not familiar with the term chuppah, it is the canopy that Jewish couples stand under when they marry. In my neologism, it refers to a situation so unspeakably gross that you flash back to your wedding day and wonder what you would have thought then had this particular aspect of married life been shown to you. A reminder that old marriage couples deserve respect, because we are tough old birds. We do what has to be done.

     I know where the term came from. There's a scene on page 50 of my memoir "Drunkard" where, in the first week of recovery, my wife and I go to Shir Hadash for Rosh Hashanah services. During a sermon on caregivers, Rabbi Eitan Weiner-Kaplow says: "How many couples look back to the day when they first stood under the chuppah and then look at their lives today and think, 'We never imagined it would be like this!"

      The book continues:

     Edie and I burst out laughing. No shit, Rabbi. We never imagined it would be like this. We laugh and don't stop. Not discreet, into-the-fist giggling. But big guffaws that draw curious looks. I don't care. We keep going, the chuckles beginning to ebb, until we glance at each other and then erupt again. We never imagined it would be like this. That helped. A lot. Laughter usually does. 

     We haven't quite managed to laugh at COVID, yet, though we have exchanged a fist bump or two, and do appreciate the besieged-soldiers-in-a-foxhole aspect of the past two weeks, when time has lost its meaning, and we have nothing better to do than wait, and care for ourselves and each other. Which itself is a kind of meaning.