A century of Ford cars made at Torrence Avenue

     The Ford Model T automobile was made of wood. The car required 250 board feet of hard maple — most of it used in the body — the reason the company's Chicago Assembly Plant was built on the Calumet River, at Torrence Avenue and 125th Street. Henry Ford had announced he wanted all of his new plants located on navigable waterways.
     "Making possible lake shipping direct from the Ford Plants at Detroit and establishing water connection with the Ford lumber supplies in Northern Michigan," the Ford News noted in 1923, celebrating the completion of the "'Last Word' in Progress Toward Ideal Factories."
     Wood construction of autos didn't endure. But the riverside facility did. Operations at Ford's Chicago Assembly Plant began Feb. 24, 1924 — 100 years ago last Saturday — and continue to this day, bigger than ever, a miracle in an era where factories shutter and manufacturing seems always either moving overseas or to the cheap labor South.
     Torrence Avenue is Ford's oldest continually operating plant, chugging away for a solid century — with occasional breaks, for strikes or remodeling. I was slightly surprised at the lack of attention — every 15-year anniversary of a brew pub gets ballyhooed by what's left of the media. But nobody seemed to notice, never mind celebrate this milestone. Ford says that's coming in the months ahead.
     No need for us to wait, though. The history of Ford and Chicago is closely bound together, and not just because the first Ford motor car sold — a two-cylinder, 8-horsepower, Model A in red, the only color then available — was purchased for $850 by Chicago dentist Ernest Pfennig and delivered to 18 Clybourn Avenue at the end of July, 1903.
     Two years later, Ford opened its first branch office in Chicago; the first assembly plant began operation in 1914 at 3915 S. Wabash.
     Ford also was inspired to create his revolutionary assembly line by watching the overhead dis-assembly of cows at Chicago's Union Stockyards.

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Flashback 1997: Pollution debate heats up

     Seventy-one fuckin' degrees. In February. In Chicago.
     I should just leave that sentence as the entire post.
     Because really, what else is there to say? "It's scary"? No kidding. Broke the old record by seven degrees? For those keeping score.

     And that was Monday. The forecast for Tuesday is sunny, windy, then rainy, high of 77 with a chance of tornadoes toward evening. I kid you not. They said that on the radio. 
     Yes, weather isn't climate. A summery day in mid-winter is no more proof of climate change than a subzero day is refutation. I used to say that the deniers were people who walk into a burning house, open the freezer, point at the ice and declare, "Ha! Look at all that ice. So much for your 'global warming.'"
     And yet. Look where we are. Where we're going. I wondered if I had ever tried to sound an alarm on climate change — for all the good it would have done — and am glad to find this, from over a quarter century ago, at least trying to put the topic on the table. Too late now.

     Many grave environmental threats have the benefit of being apparent. You can see the smog, the floating dead fish, the mountainous landfills. Others that can't be seen can be tested: lead in the water, pesticides in birds.
     Global warming is different. It may be a problem and then again it may not, because at present there is nothing obviously wrong.
     Concern over global warming is based on the conviction among many reputed scientists that the accumulation of certain pollutants in the atmosphere - carbon dioxide, sulfur - will have a "greenhouse effect" that eventually will raise the temperature of the Earth.
     Such a change would wreak havoc. Melting polar ice caps would raise ocean and lake levels, seasons would be altered, forests and farms destroyed.
     In Chicago, the two principal problems would be a rising, energized Lake Michigan and a crisis in the agricultural belt surrounding the city.
     The time frame for global warming is uncertain. Catastrophe could occur in 50 years, 100 years or - as the chorus of naysayers insists - never.
     To prevent this, the argument goes, we need to cut emissions by using cleaner technology and making it more expensive to pollute.
     "Small acts now to cut greenhouse gases make a lot of sense to reducing harm in the future," said Dr. Richard Kosobud, professor of economics and a specialist in environmental economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who has studied global warming.
     Those who dismiss the prospect point instead to the enormous cost of reducing greenhouse gases, which are produced by burning fuel, particularly gasoline and coal.
     "The first thing it means is higher energy prices for virtually everything that's used," said David Montgomery, of a Washington, D.C., public relations firm promoting a study from the American Automobile Manufacturers Association. "For gasoline, an increase of about 50 cents a gallon, for residential natural gas, an increase of almost 50 percent . . . for electricity, an increase of 25 percent."
     Manufacturers argue - and have spent millions of dollars on advertising to promote their claims - that fighting global warming will hurt the United States economically while failing to address the problem, since Third World nations will continue to spew pollution.
     "What they're doing is inventing a scenario of dramatic cuts soon, which I don't think any reasonable advocate wants," Kosobud said. "The kind of cuts most economists advocate is a gradually rising set of tax increases on fossil fuels. This could be managed with a tradeable emission permit scheme."
     The world's nations are meeting this December at a United Nations climate conference in Kyoto, Japan, to hash out a plan to prevent global warming.
     On Wednesday, President Clinton announced the U.S. position concerning the conference - a middle-of-the-road compromise that infuriated critics on both sides. "The Clinton administration plan fights a five-alarm blaze with a garden hose," said Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club's Global Warming and Energy Program.
     "The Clinton administration," a spokesman for a conservative Michigan free market group wrote, after dismissing the idea of global warming as "globaloney," "is trying to stampede the world into suicidal restrictions on energy consumption based partly on a falsified UN document."
     What Clinton proposes is to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by the period 2008 to 2012 and reduce them in the following five-year period.
     The plan would provide tax breaks to spur energy efficiency and would begin the creation of an international emissions trading program. Industries would be granted credits permitting their greenhouse gas emissions, and those who had excess credits - through pollution-abatement steps, for instance - could then sell the credits to those who needed them.
     Opponents of tough global warming measures find this plank of the plan unconstitutional.
     "Government designs on pollution trading are flawed in an important respect: They do not recognize the importance of establishing the things to be traded as property rights," said Jim Johnston, director and co-founder of the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Palatine. "That sounds arcane, but its very important."
     He said that such a plan is a violation of the Fifth Amendment - basically seizing an asset, in this case, the right to release greenhouse gases - without compensation.
     "What they're doing is denying property rights," he said.
     Although being condemned as too strong, Clinton's plan is far weaker than that embraced by other countries. The European Union, for instance, is calling for a 7.5 percent cut below 1990 levels by 2005 and a 15 percent cut by 2010.
     Critics of the administration's plan have been trying to rally support by focusing attention on its internationalist aspects, alleging that U.S. sovereignty was being eroded by a cabal of UN overlords.
     Global warming is a vexing issue because of the wide range of opinions from entrenched groups that are not about to yield. On one side, there are those who deny the very existence of the problem. "Do not assume that the science has been settled," Johnston said. "The critics of the science are legion."
     On the other are those who are convinced, in the words of a letter sent to Clinton earlier this month and signed by 17 environmental groups, that global warming poses "the most serious environmental threat facing the planet."
     What is being furiously debated is whether we can afford to wait until we find out who's right.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 24, 1997

Don't be afraid, it's just history

Untitled (Toni Morrison) by Robert McCurdy (National Portrait Gallery)

     If the three Canadians who discovered insulin in 1921 were themselves diabetic and trying to save their own lives, would that make their accomplishment less significant?
     I'd say no. Their breakthrough still benefits uncounted millions.
     Similarly, I do not discount the American Revolution because the colonists were thinking mostly of their own interests.
     They still forged a new type of freedom. For themselves. At first.
But that freedom began to spread — rather like a virus escaping a lab — and kept infecting others.
    That is the American story in a nutshell: One group secures rights for itself, then those rights are claimed by a more disadvantaged group.
     While soaked with blood and outrage, it is still an inspiring story. That's why I'm so puzzled that Florida and Texas pretend that telling the core American narrative somehow hurts their children.
     Which is more inspiring? That wealthy planter and slave owner Thomas Jefferson paused from gardening at Monticello to write the Declaration of Independence? Or that his grandchildren, descendants of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman Jefferson made his concubine, would some day gain their rights as free citizens — in theory — under that very same document?
     I'll take the second story. It displays the promise of America. You can't feel bad hearing it, unless you're rooting for slavery.
     The past helps us understand the present. If you are agog at the Alabama court casting embryos as children — albeit very well-behaved children — it might help to remember that while Black Americans won the right to vote in 1865, American women would not receive the same right for another 55 years, until 1920. American wives and mothers and sisters lagged two generations behind those once considered sub-human chattel.

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The box your stuff goes in right before it becomes your stuff

 

    Leaving the Ace Hardware in Northbrook, I noticed this Amazon Rivian Electric Delivery Van 700 — you could hardly miss it. One of thousands rolled out over the past 16 months in cities all over the country. I think I was drawn by its rich blue grey, rounded corners, and the way the top of that back wheel is covered by the bottom trim, a look I think of as "Citroen-like." 

     The vans get about 150 miles on a charge. Drivers usually use between 20 and 40 percent of the charge in a day. There are some interesting features — the driver's side door, for instance, swings out like any other truck door, but the passenger door is a pocket door — it slides rather than opening out, to avoid being clipped off by passing traffic or dooring cyclists. 

    There isn't a passenger seat — delivering packages is a one man job, for now, until Amazon figures out how to replace that person with a gizmo — but a jump seat that folds out if there's ever a second person who needs to ride in the van. Somone put a lot of thought into making it easy to make deliveries — for instance, put the van in park, and the door between the driver's compartment and the cargo area automatically slides open.  It's tall — clearance height of 9'7, and most drivers can stand up fully inside.

     I had a shock-of-the-new moment of confusion when I saw it, because I think of Prime as one of the streaming services we get, like Netflix or Hulu or Max.
     What are they delivering? I wondered, idiotically, as I took this shot and then walked a few feet in the direction of home. Oh right, I thought, catching the back of the van. That place. They deliver a lot, actually. Hard to keep all this stuff straight sometimes. 

Jim Tyree

      Live long enough, and men you know become statues.
      Well, that's how it's been for me anyway. Maybe for you, not so much.
      Some I knew fairly well: Roger Ebert, Irv Kupcinet, Jack Brickhouse. 
      Some I only spoke to once or twice: Michael Jordan, Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Harry Caray.

      All men, so far. Women don't seem to get statues. I'm not sure why, but lucky them. Being rendered into bronze has to be a mixed blessing. You need to be dead, usually. They make an exception for sports heroes. Though some of the statues — Ebert's, for instance — well, not the best likeness. 

      Some have other memorials as well. Harry Caray, for instance, the broadcaster, has a statue outside Wrigley Field, and a namesake restaurant in River North. I was trucking there Monday, through the double-deserted downtown. Especially empty because it was both President's Day, when many government offices were closed, and a Monday, when many workers wring out an extra day of weekend.

     So pretty much alone, proceeding along the 300 block of North Clark Street, heading to Harry Caray's to have lunch with a reader who had bought the meal in a charity auction, when I was stopped in my tracks by the plaque above.

      First, I'd never seen a memorial like this — a metal marker, not on the public way, but a private sidewalk between blocks, on a shortcut I was vectoring through.
      And second, I knew Jim Tyree, CEO of Mesirow Financial. He rescued the Sun-Times in 2009, leading a group of investors who, by paying $5 million and assuming $20 million in debt, snatched it from the vultures who'd have picked it clean long ago. 

      I remember the cocktail party he threw after he bought the paper. It wasn't for everybody — just machers — and I was surprised to find myself among the select. I wandered the crowd, nibbled appetizers, while running what I would say to him over in mind, smiling a little, thinking of Luca Brasi practicing his greeting by himself in the opening of "The Godfather."
    "Don Corleone. I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to your home... on the wedding day of your daughter..."
     I finally worked my way up to Jim, waiting for an opening and inserting myself into a gap in the circle of well-wishers. He looked at me. I introduced myself and said, formally "Mr. Tyree, thank you for saving the Sun-Times."
      To which he replied, "People tell me you're the reason they read the Sun-Times."
      Which left me speechless, groping for a response.  What I came up with was this:
      "Thank you. I'm reluctant to quote David Radler ... " — the predatory felon who owned the paper before Tyree — "...but he liked to say, 'When you make the sale, close your briefcase and walk away." 
    And I turned and left. We spoke again in the brief time he owned the paper — when he came down with cancer, I gave him Evan Handler's "Time on Fire," a primer on staying alive and keeping your spirits up while battling the Big C. 

     That wasn't what killed him — a technician preparing him for dialysis messed up the line into his artery, introduced oxygen, and that got him. An unfair end for a very giving man, someone who loved Chicago. 

     And now he is part of Chicago, literally an element of the infrastructure, like a fire hydrant or a lamppost, built into the ground, part of the pavement.  I'm not sure whether I'd like it if this caught on — you're trying to get somewhere, and all these prominent individuals call to you from below your feet. It's cool that there's the one. Jim Tyree deserves much more. But it's a start, and made me think of him, which is the point of these tributes. 

Clark Street, 12 noon.

Chicago is not the City that Bumbles

     Oh, Mayor Johnson. Really? You show up at an editorial board meeting on Monday and are shocked — shocked! — to discover the meeting is on the record, meaning the newspaper reporters present reserve the right to listen to what the mayor of the city of Chicago says about important matters and then relate that information to residents.
     So you flee, shrieking (or so I imagine. I wasn't there, alas).
     Surprised, were you? I'm surprised too. Amazed, really. The bar is pretty low at this point, but it wouldn't surprise me more had the mayor shown up not wearing pants.

     Because, really. If Brandon Johnson doesn't even trust himself to open his mouth and let words come out, can't even try, then how is anybody else supposed to trust him?

     Mr. Mayor, let me level with you: You are playing into the media's hands.
     Yes, we ask our questions, getting all sad and belligerent when you don't answer, or rather, start tossing some off-point word salad that means nothing.
     But we're also secretly pleased. Because we don't really want to hear your side. We're just pretending to, because our job demands it. When you clam up, you're putty in our hands. It's liberating.
     How so? Let me tell you a story.
     So a highly placed Illinois judge comes to my office at the newspaper for the purpose of planting a dagger squarely in the back of Tim Evans, chief Judge of the Cook County Circuit Court, whose management style is lacking in her eyes. She's a respectable source. Her complaints seem valid — court system run poorly, yaddity yadda yadda. I prepare my column, pinning Evans wriggling to a board for the amusement of all.
     But journalism is a kabuki, a highly stylized form. It has its finely-calibrated rituals. Before I can run my vivisection of Judge Evans, there is something I must do — you kids, fresh hires, any ideas? C'mon, don't they teach you anything at the Medill School of Storytelling, Communicative Arts, Interpretive Dance, or whatever they call the place nowadays? (Actually, it is — checking my notes — "The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications." A staggering example of malpractice, which I only mention because I intend to start a fundraising campaign to purchase an ampersand for the school).

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Train accident

     A long, continuous train horn. Unbroken. Wehrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.... 
     "That's a person," I said to my wife.
     Meaning, the only reason an engineer lays on the horn like that is someone on the tracks.
     Suicide, most likely. At least I hoped it was. The only thing worse than jumping in front of a train, intentionally, is to be blundering along, earpods screwed in, chatting on your iPhone, look up and think, "Shit a train," and bam it's over.

     Besides, most are suicides. There is that subtle hint of the ringing bells and flashing lights and lowered gates to help even the most careless avoid accidents.
     I live one block from the Northbrook Metra station. Quite intentionally. When we bought this house, nearly a quarter century ago, I wanted to live by public transportation so I could go into work without driving. Driving sucks. At least city driving. If I need to drive north, to Wisconsin, or west, to Iowa, I'm all for that. Coffee, tunes, the semi-open road.

      We can see the tracks from our dining room window. 
     Of course we thought about the noise. Those train horns. The clanging bells. And, such as Monday night, the ambulance and fire trucks that quickly arrived on the scene. I gazed uneasily out the living room window at the strobing lights. Some poor person...
     We were smart. Before we bought the house, we sat in what would be the master bedroom and waited. A train came by — a sort of gentle whoosh. We decided that we could live with that. Then we moved in, and the first freight came by, rattling the century-old windows in their dry frames. You get used to it.
     I'd taken the train downtown Monday to have lunch with a reader and his wife who bought the experience at a charity auction. They live in Kenosha. I told them, rather than go all the way into the city, we could meet at Prairie Grass —run by Sarah Stegner, the former chef of the Ritz Carlton dining room. I tried to tempt them with pie. Door County Sour Cherry. Coconut Creme. Pumpkin.
     But they wanted the full Chicago experience. So I suggested Harry Caray's on Kinzie, my go-to restaurant showing off the city. That lovely little Dutch revival building that somehow survived the ravages of time. The walls, a museum of memorabilia. It doesn't hurt that there is a photo of my younger son, on the mound at Wrigley Field, throwing out the first pitch at the Cubs/Sox game on the 3rd of July. A frozen rope to the catcher.
     Why would anyone jump in front of a train? I know the answer. Despair and sorrow and sadness and hopelessness and mental illness and addiction. Lost romance, lost job, lost hope, just plain lost. A permanent solution to a temporary problem.
     The devastated loved ones of those who perish under the train often put little white crosses and plastic flowers on the spot where the death occurred, and Metra leaves them for a polite period, sometimes for a good long while, to bleach in the sun and become faded and pitious. One, just off the platform by a tree, lingered for years, and I would eye it uneasily waiting for a train. Maybe even with a trace of annoyance — I'm sorry for your personal tragedy, but it's sobering enough to be going to a depopulated downtown to attend some meeting you could as easily conduct on Zoom or never at all. Must I consider your tragedy too? A petty thought, but you have to be who you are. It isn't very much to ask. Pause to remember this person was here.
     Monday night, the commotion lasted for a couple hours. Emergency trucks coming and going, other trains blasting their horns, loud and long, as they inched past what I assumed were recovery efforts. What I think of as, "picking someone up with a tweezers."

     Only it wasn't that. I checked the news the next day. Not a suicide — a 23-year old woman, running across the tracks. Taken to Evanston Hospital. Condition unknown.
     Running across the tracks. Jesus F. Christ. It mystifies me. Where are they going? Monday, when I returned from downtown, I got off the train, crossed Shermer, and tucked myself behind the crossing gate. Everyone else, getting off the train, stayed between the gate and the train, the better to surge across the tracks when the train pulls away. Timing their bolt from the blots so they're in motion even before the stainless steel wall of the train has removed itself. Which can be a problem if there is a train coming the other way. I've seen people start, then dance back as a train passes the other direction.
     A cautious move, on my part, to wait behind the gate. Habit. When we moved here, the boys were 3 and 4, and I realized the best way to inculcate train safety in them is to do it myself. It's very hard to be hit by a train if remain behind the gate until it raises up.
     This is not to criticize the young lady, whom I hope is alright. Maybe she was just grazed. That's unlikely. Usually, you get hit by a train, you know it. Maybe she'll reach out when she gets out of the hospital, and can tell us where she was going in such a hurry. Though I wouldn't expect that. It's got to be embarrassing, to be so careless. It's got to add insult to injury.