Chicago Voices #3: Road sign warrior

     I was walking north up Wells Street the other day, looking for Erie, when I was reminded of a pet peeve of mine. The signs on one way streets downtown often only have print on the side facing traffic. Thus pedestrians, such as myself, going the opposite way of the car traffic, are left to our memory, or GPS, to figure what street we are approaching or, must pass the sign and look back. Which does not seem a system that behooves a great city.

    I thought of complaining, but what would be the point? Who would listen? Nobody. What would happen? Nothing. 

     That is not the way of Steve Bahnsen. Readers with long memories might recall the column in 2015 that I wrote about Bahnsen, a self-appointed monitor of highway signs or, should I say, the abysmal state of highway signs. Since that ran, I have received a steady stream of countless updates.  I thought I would share one. Whether you view him as a tireless advocate or a fixated crank, he reflects that very American notion that gaps should be filled and wrongs should be corrected, 

     I am thrilled and delighted to be able to share the attached photos of the new Exit Number plaques and gores just installed along US Highways 61/151 in Dubuque. This culminates a 20 year project to have these done.
     The photos are in an order coming from the south with the first exit being 183. The exits continue north with the last one being 190.
     (Not all of these have exits or entrances in both directions thus the gap in numbering them.)
     Gores are at the exit with a green arrow. New gore signs were installed featuring the next exit number also.   
     One photo shows the Mile Post 189 sign. Miles begin at the southern or western border of a state. US 61 enters Iowa from Missouri south of Keokuk. Mile Post 1 is a mile north of the border. Dubuque is thus 189 miles from the Missouri border.
     After crossing the Mississippi River, US 61/151 continues in Wisconsin where the numbering system begins all over with Exit 1 where the highways go to Hazel Green, Wis and East Dubuque, Illinois.
     Numbering these exits will be helpful for those who need GPS to find where they are going.
     Exit numbers are shown on the new 2023 Iowa highway map.
     These signs are near the US 20 bridge that was shown last year on the Mighty Mississippi River stamps.
     I hope you have enjoyed this information about I O W A.

     Steve

Which leaves a question: what is a gore? I put it to Steve. A few days passed, and then I received this:

     I was downstate and in Kentucky yesterday. Now I have about fifty reports to write about
signs and postal problems. So I just got to your message.
     To define a "gore" on an expressway or Interstate:
     It is the area where the exit is. And is between where the mainline continues straight
and the exit ramp begins. People get into the right lane to exit through the gore to get
to the exit ramp.
     The green sign here with an arrow is called the Gore Exit sign.
     If the expressway has exit numbers, that number is now shown on the Gore Exit sign.
as another reminder for travelers of where they are going.
     Those Dubuque exits were not numbered at all before so that is why everything is new.
     Also, less that one tenth of one percent of the exits nationwide are to the Left. So the
arrow on these signs point to the left. An example is when you are going to O'Hare on
I 190, there is a Left Exit to go south on the Tri State, I 294.
     However that Gore Exit sign has been down for months!!!

Wagon of Fools

Wagon of Fools by Hendrik Gerritsz Pot (Franz Hals Museum)

     It's not that I don't trust you. That would be nuts. I don't even know you. But my wife, well, she is convinced that if readers are aware when we go on vacation, then one will rush over and rob our house. Heck, she could be right. It is a crazy world. Things happen. And she does tend to be right. But even if she is not — and in this case, I suspect she isn't -- one secret to staying married for 33 years is to respect the  improbable concerns of your loved one. 

     So when we're away, such as our current jaunt through Denmark and the Netherlands, I try to draw the veil, and prop up the pillows of these posts to make it seem like there's a person here. 

     But now we're heading home. So unless you're very quick and grab your pry bar and your big sack and race over and start looting within the next few hours, we should be okay. (Not that I'm encouraging you to do that. We have a tight-knit, vigilant block of dog walkers and sharp-eyed, concerned people. My greatest protection is that there really isn't anything worth taking. A few nice Cooper lamps, maybe).

     That leaves me with the challenge of what to say. The past week was lined up before we departed.  But I carelessly left Friday unaccounted for, forgetting the bone-deep exhaustion that comes from marching around foreign capitals for a week. A few days ago, my wife looked at her FitBit and announced that we had logged 25,000 steps. More than 10 miles. Phew.

     So okay, writing. Mmm... There must be something, right? Observations galore, just waiting for me to blow a whistle and order them into formation. Tweeeeeet!  Line up!

     No? That didn't work. The perceptions just sprawl around the divans of the mind, gazing at me with languid torpor. 

     Can't have that. Not after biking around Copenhagen, climbing several tall towers, and seeing every painting in Amsterdam.

     Paintings like the one above, in the Franz Hals Museum in Haarlem, It stood out, or at least will have to do until I can get home, drop my bags, and slide behind my iMac — provided you haven't stolen it — and organize my thoughts, which right now pretty much revolve around where to get the next herring sandwich.

      It's called "Wagon of Fools" by Hendrik Gerritsz Pot. Painted in 1640, the work is a commentary on the infamous tulip craze of 1637, when the Dutch went mad for the bright flowers, and fortunes were made ... and then lost ... on speculation in bulbs. You see the travelers drinking and counting their profits while hope — in the form of a bird — flies off. Notice the tulips on the flag, and being worn as crowns, or cuckold horns. 

     I was about to say "I hope this doesn't perfectly encapsulate our current political situation," but hope, as I like to say, is not a success strategy. And it kinda does.

      But even if it is apt, there is also a kind of comfort. Some reassurance in realizing that widespread self-destructive idiocy is not the sole property of America in 2023, though it sometimes does feel like that. We didn't invent it. Folly is a general characteristic of the human condition. The Dutch somehow muddled through their tulip craze, and managed to laugh at themselves later. Americans will somehow get past this, and even learn to laugh at ourselves. We might as well. Everybody else does.

The Matching Game.

    Are parlor games even a thing anymore? They can't be, because parlors — formal rooms reserved for entertaining — have pretty much vanished, turned into living rooms where we slump in front of the flatscreen (I originally typed "slump in front of the television" but "television" suddenly felt wrong, like calling a refrigerator an "icebox.")
    Is entertaining still a practice? Occasionally we invite people over, after realizing we haven't seen them in years. And even more occasionally we are invited over. But work isn't the only realm where we've retreated indoors to play Wordle. 

     Or maybe that's just me. Maybe you are partying with your pals like Holly Golightly. I don't want to forget Thoreau's essential dictum about never mistaking a private ailment for an infected atmosphere.
     Perhaps I should define my terms. I think of parlor games as the silly challenges hosts impose upon their guests at cocktail parties. (Cocktail parties! I remember those. Thirty years ago we had cocktail parties and invited our many friends. I'm sure young people still have them. At least I hope they still do. Cocktail parties were fun).
     Now we have family gatherings — lots of them. For Jewish holidays — Rosh Hashanah is coming up. Passover in the spring. Beer and brats at Hanukkah. And secular holidays. Fourth of July. Or  the Sunday before last, a joint Labor Day/Oldest Son in Town barbecue. Not a lot of people — 15 friends and relatives; we might have had 10 more, but several families were out of town.  We grilled hot dogs, chicken and salmon burgers.
    My sister-in-law and her eldest daughter had been shopping at the Skokie International Market on Lincoln Avenue, and were struck by the array of unusually flavored chips. Wanting a pretext to try them without saddling themselves with lots of bags of chips they could never eat, they  concocted a game: guess the flavor, dubbing it "The Matching Game."
     She prepared eight paper bowls, numbered one through eight. Then gave us sheets headlined "Matching Game: Identify the flavor of chips in each bowl!!" 

Game sheet

     

     Down the left side, numbers 1 through 8. Then a list of the flavors: Mexican Chicken & Tomato; Peach Beer; Beef Wellington; Steak Kebab; Roasted Cumin Lamb; Numb & Spicy Hot Pot and Roasted Fish.
     At the bottom, more instructions: "Draw a line to connect the bowl number to the flavor you think it is! " And then a final reassurance, given the number of vegetarians and vegans at any family event: "Note: these are artificially flavored .. none contain actual meat or fish!" (More exclamation points than I would use, being miserly in that department. But a key to games is to impart enthusiasm, so exclamatory zeal can be forgiven).
    We sat around the coffee table, passed the bowls, one at a time — this seemed important, for encouraging discussion. Much better than just having the guests have at the bowls in a random rush.  Fun was had,
    The most notable thing about the results were how indistinct most of the flavors proved to be. Only one really stood out and was universally declared — the really repulsive Peach Beer. I kept score, in my reportorial role. Some flavors completely stumped the dozen players — nobody identified Kebab correctly.  The most flavors anyone guessed correctly were three — the winners my wife and our 8-year-old grandniece. One player was disqualified for amending his answers as the flavors were revealed. The process took, oh, 20 minutes. It was fun.
     In retrospect, if you want to add spice (sorry) to the game, you can ask players to speculate what cultures enjoy which particular flavors. "Peach Beer" struck me as Middle Eastern, simply because I encountered a bottle of Mood Peach Malt Beverage in a taco place a few years back, and it hailed from Jordan.

    Wrong. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. While peach beer is a common beverage — I found this article on 26 popular American peach beers, Lays Wavy White Peach Beer Chips are imported from China.  I suppose we're going to have to get used to it.

Katy lied.

  

                   Katy lies
                   You could see it in her eyes
                   But imagine my surprise
                  When I saw you
                                 —Walter Becker/Donald Fagan

     Amazing how a word can slumber at the back of your brain for years, for decades, only to leap up, ready for duty, when the moment calls for it.
    "A katydid!" I cried, spying the gorgeous specimen atop my storm door when I returned from taking Kitty on her nighttime stroll a week ago Sunday, perching prettily atop the five coats of marine spar varnish.

     A round-headed katydid, I think. One of the 14 species of amblycorypha. 
     Not very well camouflaged in this context. Taking a risk to closely inspect my work. Nor am I 100 percent sure it's a katydid — it could be a false-leaf grasshopper — the decisive head is a bit tucked down. Though now that I look at it, it does seem a little grasshoppery.
     Either way, you have to admire the way the camouflage leaf on its back includes the veins of the leaf — details are important in any deception. An art form all their own. Vladimir Nabokov, a devoted butterfly lover, savored this sort of thing. "The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction to me," he wrote. "Its phenomenon showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. . . When a butterfly had to look like a leaf, not only were all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes were generously thrown in." Details no predator would ever notice, Nabokov cooed.

      The next morning, I spied a monarch flitting about a milkweed — they lay their eggs in milkweed. I couldn't get a good photo, I'm afraid, as the beastie was instantly on the wing. 

     But it does lead to an interesting question: two insects, both trying to survive, one by hiding, the other by advertising itself boldly. What's the difference? The katydid would make a tasty snack, while the monarch is poisonous, like the milkweeds it feeds upon as a caterpillar. So the bright orange and black coloration is a big lepidopteral "fuck you!" to potential predators. "Go ahead, eat me. It's your funeral."

     Which has to be encouraging to us toxic, out-in-the-open sorts. Leave hiding in the shadows to others, the timid leaf munchers. Fear nothing; our poison protects us.

      When I opened the screen door, the katydid oafishly moved to the lip of the door frame, where closing the door would crush it. Good thing its ancestors cooked up that leaf disguise, over countless millennia, and willed it to their progeny, because they're not very bright, the trademark curse of heirs and legacies everywhere. Kind soul that I am, despite my venom, I shooed it away and let it live to hide for another day.

Flashback 2005: "Fancy lamps"

     The assignment was to write about a Chicago factory. Any factory. I remember flipping open the business-to-business Yellow Pages — it was that long ago — and settling on a small company that made dental tools. Because who writes about that? It could be me. But the owner or, rather, his brother, didn't want to talk to the media. So I settled on Cooper Lamp, because I drove by their factory on the Kennedy. And, by the time I was done, found myself comparing it to the Ford factory on Torrence Avenue. It's a long piece, but I'm away for a while, so I thought I'd share it with you to pass the time.     

     From the street, the factory housing the Frederick Cooper Lamp Company is not as ugly as most. The building was originally a ladies undergarment plant, built around 1900; it has a courtyard and windows, luxuries that would later be dispensed with in most factories. The four-storey brick building, with a square tower double that height, is a reminder that a factory was once the centrepiece of a neighbourhood, second only to the local church. The tower, like a steeple, catches the eye; it advertises the product with a sign informing the 260,000 cars that pass every day along the Kennedy Expressway leading out of Chicago that Cooper produces lamps of elegance.
     ‘Elegance’ can be taken as an euphemism for ‘costliness’ and Cooper lamps are indeed expensive. The lamps are made of brass and copper, maple and marble, bronze and china, silverplate and gold leaf. No one has any idea how many different styles they make and the number keeps changing. The cheapest costs $200, and from there prices soar into the thousands for crystal chandeliers.
     None of the luxury of Cooper’s product extends to the factory itself. The entrance is through a single flight of narrow stairs leading to a small, not particularly clean, reception area. This was last decorated, from the look of it, in the early 1970s: pea green carpeting, and fake wood-panelled walls. A few well-tended plants, a carved eagle and some handmade sparkly butterflies on the bulletin board save the room from dreariness.
     The public face of Cooper Lamp is more attractive: Suzanne Lauren, an energetic woman whose dangly bracelets bear an uncanny resemblance to decorative elements of certain Cooper lamps. She has worked at Cooper for twenty-three years and is now the vice president of design. She is accompanied by her dog, Cooper, a German shepherd that has the run of the front office, a room as cluttered as the reception area is bare. One wall is given over to manila folders; the desks are piled high with catalogues and promotional materials; lamps in various stages of assembly crouch in the corner as if they have wandered off the factory floor.
     A lamp is divided into four parts. First is the shade—a screen of paper or cloth that softens the harshness of a bare bulb. Second is the electrical socket that receives the light bulb. Third, holding the socket aloft, is the base which is often decorative. Anything can be used for a lamp base—bowling balls, football helmets, toy trains—but given Cooper’s high-end market, the bases tend to be brass urns, china vases as well as an eclectic range of objects that seem designed to appeal to wealthy widows: brass elephants, bronze bulldogs, Chinese horses, verdigris dancing frogs, copper Nepalese horns, metal palm trees. Floor lamps tend to be more uniform because of their larger size, their bases simple brass poles or turned wooden posts.
     Under the base is the part that most non-lamp people never consider: the mounting. This is a little circle of wood or stone or, in less expensive lamps, plastic, that acts as a buffer between base and table top. The mounting is like a pedestal for a statue. Without it, a lamp looks unfinished, like an urn with a lampshade on top.
     In practice a lamp has many more pieces than just these four main components; each part consists of many more parts. A mounting might be three circles of wood, each a bit smaller than the one below. A base might be an urn that is assembled out of a dozen various rings and handles and curving sections. An electrical socket includes a cord threaded through a metal channel and a plug and a harp (the loop of brass that holds the shade). A shade can be a complex confection of cloth, metal, cardboard, or even a decorative fringe consisting of one hundred inch-long threads, each one holding a colourful glass bead.
     This multitude of parts—wooden feet, stone discs, copper tubes, glass beads, porcelain dogs, brass finials, tin pineapples—dictates the set-up of the 240,000 square foot Cooper factory. Most of the plant is given over to rows of shelves and bins and tables to hold the thousands of dusty parts. The pieces are stored where they are made since the Cooper plant consists of a series of shops. This makes the factory unusual in this age. The typical modern factory either makes something—forging steel rods, moulding rubber tires, dipping chrome plating; or it assembles something—putting together bicycles. But Cooper does both, out of necessity.
     ‘All the small businesses in the Chicago area stopped—wood carving, plating, metal forming and casting,’ says Frederick Gershanov, who owns Cooper Lamp with his older brother Peter. ‘So all those operations we took into our company.’

To continue reading, click here.

You be the ethicist

"La table surréaliste" by Alberto Giacometti (Pompidou Center)

    
     I'm fortunate to work in a business where ethics are important. I'd have a hard time keeping my job otherwise. Yes, newspapers try to make money, like everybody else. But most have parameters. We have our limits. Notwithstanding what the GOP imagines, we don't just make up what we think will get the most clicks. Our stories reflect matters that can be verified or disproven. Looking at Fox News, I can understand that having values might be a handicap. As porn stars and scam artists know, immorality sells.

     That said, ethical problems can still be vexing. I had one in April that bears recalling. I wrote a story looking back at Chicago history — how the paper covered disasters over 75 years — and sent a photographer to take a portrait of a person quoted in the story. Sometimes I'd show up for one of these sessions, to hang around and mother hen. But this time I didn't, mainly because the story was already done and too long as it was.
     The photo got taken. The next day the photographer called, and said, in essence: there was something troubling about that photo shoot. We took it in the subject's basement, and the man had a Nazi flag hanging on the wall.
     Did you ask him why it was there? I wondered. Maybe it was a souvenir. Maybe his uncle took the flag from Berchtesgaden when he was with Patton's 3rd Army.
     No, she said. She didn't ask. She was by herself. She didn't feel comfortable raising the question. I can't say I blamed her.
     To me, there were two immediate priorities. First, we needed to decide if the Nazi flag meant we shouldn't use the quotes and/or the photo. And second, I had to make sure this photographer's concerns were given full consideration. That she felt seen.
     "What do you think we should do?" I asked. She said she didn't know, except that we should be aware of it. I told her I'd discuss this with my editor and get back to her.
    I was tempted to call the source back and ask, "What's with the Nazi flag?" Either it was a relic, displayed from a lack of sensitivity — though you could debate whether you need to be sensitive with displays in your own home. Maybe we were wrong to notice or care. 
     Or it could be a display of personal conviction. But if that were the case, could you really expect an honest answer? "I'm glad you asked that, Neil, I put the flag up because I think Hitler is a great guy." I didn't make the call. Shutting up is an art form.

     And should a source be barred from adding to a story because of loathsome, unrelated views? That seemed the famous cancellation we hear about.
     The editor circled back to the photographer and I did too. Are you okay? I'm sorry my assignment put you in this awkward position. We used the quotes and the photo. I didn't see why we shouldn't.
     Through an amazing coincidence, a week later another story caused me to phone the same source. While he was on the line, I asked about the flag. He said it was the size of a dish towel — the photographer had made it seem full size —  and framed with a front page announcing the end of the war. A historical display. That was a relief.
     This sort of issue is rare, but does come up from time to time. I just had a magazine editor flag a quote from a subject I spoke to at an awareness march. Did I realize that ten years ago he had been dismissed from a teaching job for exchanging inappropriate emails with a student? No, I did not. It's right there in Mr. Google. The editor cut his remarks out of the story and suggested that, were I on the ball, they never would have been in the story in the first place.
     At first I pushed back. Is this how we do things now? The main subject of the story could have cheated on her taxes in 1997. I didn't try to find out. I almost said, "You know who's writing this, yes? I come with baggage of my own." But rather I said, No, if I'm confident a person is who they purport to be, I don't deep dive into their personal background.
     But times change, and we change with them. I admitted that Google-searching every proper name in the story and checking for dirt seems like "sound practice." And it might be, if it leads to finding out that the people you're quoting in some benign context are in fact bad people.
     But it's more likely, in my estimation, to create ludicrous situations: "'I think chocolate ice cream tastes good,' said Todd Blandersnoot, who was charged with shoplifting in South Dakota in 2005." 

     What do you think?

You be the historian.

  
     Social media bombards us with information, from the true to the misleading,  the skewed to the dead wrong. The focus is on political deceptions, and rightly so. But that is only the beginning.
     To be fair, the most vetted of history books contain mistakes. My most recent book, "Every Goddamn Day," published by the rigorous University of Chicago Press, nevertheless has a typo — a dropped "t" — which is unfortunate, though perhaps inevitable in a nearly-500 page book.
     The story I always tell is of Paul Johnson's "A History of the American People," a majestic survey of our national story, written by an esteemed historian, published by HarperCollins.
     One fact that really stood out for me was on page 355, when Johnson is talking about the national bank under Andrew Jackson. "The fact that Senators Clay and Calhoun put together a committee to inspect the vaults and reported them full did not convince the President, coming from such a source. (He thereby inaugurated an American tradition which continues to this day: every year, the Daughters of the American Revolution send a committee of ladies to visit the vaults of Fort Knox, to ensure that America's gold is still in them.)
    "They do?!" I thought, immediately wanting nothing more than to accompany them. I could see it plain as day. The elevator deep into the sunless secure vaults. The ladies, with their big handbags, delicately peering between the bars at the piles of dense gold bricks. A call was placed to the DAR offices. "We've been getting inquiries about this," a nice woman said, or words to that effect. "We just published our history, and found no information about that."
     "Oh the old biddies are lying to me!" thought I, reaching out to the U.S. Army news affairs at Fort Knox, who said, in essence: "No American citizen has laid eyes on that gold since 1942."
     Ah. Simply wrong. An error. No wonder the book was so interesting. Johnson was making it up. (Unfair, I know. But it only takes a little spit to spoil the soup).
     Look at the photo above. Why, at a glance, is it obvious that whatever the picture is of, it is NOT from the 1893 World's Fair? We'll let the comments explain why.