Chicago was once the heart of country music

     Loretta Lynn hugged me. In her dressing room in Reno. After I had sent the country singer two dozen roses to say there were no hard feelings.
     More about that later.
     Country music gets the short shrift up North. People like me who enjoy it — who've been to the Grand Ole Opry and seen Montgomery Gentry, twice — tend to be on the down-low on the subject. Maybe we're embarrassed to defend our affections. For me, it's the honest human emotion. I don't have a daughter, but Ashley McBride's "Light on in the Kitchen" still chokes me up. Admitting that is off brand, I suppose.
     It shouldn't be, not in Chicago. For all the talk of Chicago as home to the blues, to jazz, and even to house music, we somehow rarely get around to talking about our rich country music heritage. Rich and deep — the WLS National Barn Dance, which predated the Opry by two years, was first broadcast 100 years ago Friday, on April 19, 1924.
     If you haven't read Mark Guarino's "Country & Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival," it's a richly-researched, utterly fascinating revelation, from the Barn Dance to Ernest Tubb coining the term "Country and Western," in 1947 at the prodding of "a record man from Chicago," trying to escape the confines of "hillbilly music."
     The program was the center of country for decades, drawing all sorts of stars. Gene Autry lived in Aurora . Bill Monroe recorded "Blue Moon of Kentucky" at the Wrigley Building. In the 1920s, Chicago mayor William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson was known as "the cowboy mayor" for his Stetson hat and Nebraska ranch, and once rode a horse into the City Council chambers. We've gone from that to a mayor who can't hold an impromptu conversation.

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Flashback 1991: Win Stracke dies — folk singer was a pioneer in kids' TV

Win Stracke

   I'm reading Mark Guarino's excellent "Country & Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival" — more about that in my column Friday — and when he got to the founding of the Old Town School of Folk Music, and Win Stracke, I found myself thinking, "Wait a sec ... I think I wrote his obit." Thirty three years ago. As to why that would stick in mind, I'm not sure. His unusual name, maybe. Or the fact that I spoke with Studs Terkel about him. I would draw your attention to the name of the contributing writer at the end: Mary A. Johnson. That was the future Mary Mitchell. 

     Win Stracke, 83, troubadour  and co-founder of the Old Town School of Folk Music, died Saturday at his home in the North Shore Hotel in Evanston.

     For decades, Mr. Stracke, a big, deep-voiced, gentle-humored balladeer, was an important presence on the Chicago folk scene, performing his music on radio, television and the stage.
     Born in Lorraine, Kan., in 1908, he was the son of a German Baptist minister, Robert Stracke.
     The family moved to what became the 43rd Ward in 1909, and the elder Stracke served as minister at the church at Willow and Burling.
     Later, Mr. Stracke immortalized the ward in a ballad about its wild politics and colorful politicians.
     Win Stracke began singing at his father's church and soon became a soloist at other churches.
     During World War II, he served in an Army anti-aircraft battery in Europe, carrying his guitar through six overseas campaigns, playing his folk songs for troops.
     With the advent of television, he performed in what were known as Chicago School TV shows. He had a running role on the "Studs Place" show, the "Hawkins Falls" soap opera, "The Garroway Show," and his own children's shows, "Animal Playtime" and "Time for Uncle Win."
     Mr. Stracke's soft wit and gentle presence made him ideal for children's television.
     "Let's see," Mr. Stracke told his audience in an early "Animal Playtime" show, which made its debut in March, 1953. "Let's sing about animals that we like. What kind do you like?"
     Pausing for a second, he gazed directly at the camera and at his young viewers. Then he brightened. "Dogs? Why sure, we all like dogs, don't we? Now. . . ," and he began strumming a simple song about dogs, one of thousands of folk songs he composed.
     "He pushed other people into loving music," said Dawn Greening, who helped Mr. Stracke start the Old Town School of Folk Music. "He shared his love for the music with everybody, I just remember where I first heard him sing; one of the places was the Gate of Horn. I just thought he was really wonderful."
     When "Animal Playtime" was canceled in 1954, thousands of mothers — who appreciated Mr. Stracke's mixture of lively songs with lessons about animals — mounted an angry crusade that led to the show's reinstatement.
     "You can say Win was Chicago's Bard because of the songs he sang," said Studs Terkel, who called Mr. Stracke his "oldest friend."
     "Win was a friend of blues singers, folk singers, everybody. He sang in picket lines when the CIO was organized. He was there whenever there was difficulties at picket lines. He was a stalwart."
       Mr. Stracke "was the figure that brought together social action, the love of tradition and really good fun," said Stuart Rosenberg, a local musician, songwriter and WBEZ radio show host.
       "There is a whole generation of singers and songwriters who looked to Win for their first inspiration. He was a unique figure in that he related to everyone."
      In 1957, Mr. Stracke began the Old Town School of Folk Music with Greening, Frank Hamilton and Gertrude Soltker. Begun with one teacher and 20 students, the school helped make Chicago a center of folk singing.
     "The whole idea is to give people who love folk music a chance to participate rather than to just listen," Mr. Stracke said at the time. "This interest in folk music by city people betrays their search for the basic realities which they don't find expressed in commercial popular music."
     Mr. Stracke was a member of the Civil War Round Table and the Chicago Historical Society. He wrote the words to "Freedom Country," a 23-minute cantata celebrating the Illinois sesquicentennial in 1967.
     For the last 20 years he had been retired, living for seven years in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, then returning to the United States to live in Fort Collins, Colo., until three years ago, when he returned to Chicago.
     Survivors include two daughters, Jane Bradbury and Barbara Pavey, and two grandchildren.
     Services were pending.
     Contributing: Mary A. Johnson

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 30, 1991 

Hay as happiness, beauty and freedom at Joffrey's 'Midsummer Night's Dream'

Photo by Carolyn McCabe for the Joffrey Ballet

     Noon one day last week found 45 of the fittest young people on the planet — dancers with the Joffrey Ballet — lying on their backs in the company's Loop rehearsal space, on a floor covered with what looks like hay.
     Swedish contemporary music plays. Suddenly they leap up and scatter, running in all directions, flinging the hay at each other, while a big hay wheel is rolled in. Two dancers leap atop it and perform a kind of courtship gavot.
     Welcome to the dress rehearsal of "Midsummer Night's Dream," opening next week at the Lyric Opera House. Despite its name, the ballet has nothing to do with either the Shakespeare play or George Balanchine's 1962 ballet. Rather, this is Alexander Ekman's joyful solstice frolic.
     A glance at the prop list gives an idea of the production's whimsy. Along with 45 flower crowns, 40 umbrellas, 40 wooden chairs, 40 wine glasses, two bicycles and a hand-held fish — not to be confused with the wooden herring; this is a Scandinavian entertainment, after all — at the very end, in bold-face so as not to be missed, is:
     "Hay: 1100 pounds total."
     "It's actually raffia," said stage manager Mandy Heuermann. "Haylike, but much less allergenic. It's flame-treated, to make sure it's safe, since we basically cover the whole stage floor with it."
     Real hay might also impale the dancers, who are barefoot and are experienced at performing in clouds of various types.
     "The dancers are pretty accustomed to dealing with atmosphere," said principal stage manager Katherine Selig. "We use fog, we use smoke, we use haze. They're used to it; it's just part of the job."

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The comfy chair!

     Sunday was a beautiful day to be in Chicago, walking down Halsted Street from Montrose to Belmont. Clear blue skies, temperature in the 70s. It seemed all of Boystown was out, and the bars had their windows flung open and people could be seen in the dimness within, gathered in groups, eating and drinking.
     The entire experience was a reminder that, sometimes, if you do something kind for someone, it rebounds well. I hadn't begun the day planning to spend an hour strolling city streets — the plan was to help our future daughter-in-law pack to move into a new condo. Well, my wife's plan — she has the glassware packing skills, from her years at Mindscape Gallery in Evanston. I was there to drive, provide moral support, do what packing I could, and lift heavy things. I felt a little bad, to be spending the glorious day indoors. But duty is duty.
    Noon came and went, but by 2:30 p.m. lunch was suggested and I did not argue. I was good with wherever anybody wanted to go, and that turned out to be the Momo Factory, a Nepalese dumpling place at Broadway and Belmont. It's a mile and a quarter away, my soon-to-be-relative explains. Were we good for that? We were.

     So packing morphed into a leisurely stroll through a city full of young people. We passed spots we used to know, and chatted on the changes — this spot is now that. Yoshi's Cafe is closed, recently enough there is a note on the door, re-directing mail. We had a nice dinner there once.
     I of course thought about all those Floridian cops cringing and damning Chicago as some kind of hellscape, when — on Sunday at least, through these neighborhoods — it was about as inviting and happy as a place can be. We cut down Melrose, the block where my wife used to live, and I pointed out the balcony from her place.
     At one point we saw the chair above, and I noticed that rather than give it away, someone had put a QR code, asking for $15, which is not bad for a second-hand office chair. (And a "Comfy chair!" at that — could that be a sly Monty Python reference? Or did those stop decades ago?) 

     Like a farmer setting out eggs at a wooden stand on a countryside road, my future daughter-in-law observed. With a slotted box for a few dollars. Only we weren't in the trusting heartland, I thought, but on the mean streets of Chicago. Maybe not so mean after all.

      What charmed me was the owner's hope that whoever wanted the chair would take the time to convey the money, as opposed to just take the chair. Plus the modern Venmo twist. That expectation of decency, of honor. Not to be pollyannaish about it. But one person in Chicago thought there was some slight chance that a random person in need of a second-hand chair would both take it and throw some money their way. There was something sweet about that. Or maybe I was just in a hopeful mood.

'Messy, imperfect, awkward, beautiful, these people'

"Marsha," 2023, watercolor and charcoal on paper, 45x36, by Lisa Edelstein.

   
     My parents are on the move again. After two years at an assisted living facility in Buffalo Grove, it's down to Addison to a smaller place that better suits their needs. Moving means packing, and once more my wife and I boxed up their dwindling possessions — far fewer than when they left Boulder in 2022 — weeding out what can't make the transition from three rooms to one.
     "How about this?" my wife said, holding up a round metal 1950s cookie tin. "Photos."
     "Throw it away," replied my mother. She never even looked inside.
     The past burdens and buoys us, holding us back and driving us forward, like stunned survivors wandering across a minefield. The moment I clapped eyes on Lisa Edelstein's paintings, my first thought was "Jewish unease." The awkwardness of one's own relatives, frozen in the garish 1970s. The lucky few who somehow made it from Lodz to Levittown. They call to us, in their thin, wavering voices, from beyond the grave, or its lip. A hard tin to throw away, and Edelstein has taken her family Kodachromes and transformed them into evocative paintings.
     "I love finding the in-between shots, the poorly posed, the awkward, the strange angles, even damaged photos or film stills," said Edelstein, an actor you might know as Dr. Cuddy in "House." "Taking these unvalued shots and blowing the images up into carefully rendered paintings, celebrating them that way — there’s so much life and story and discomfort that gets exposed."
     Edelstein's work has to be viewed through the fog of anti-Semitism, always a haze in society but billowing up even more after six months of the war in Gaza. Not the easiest moment to be Jewish, never mind examine the out-of-placeness of our tribe.
     "Yes, this is a wildly fraught time to be Jewish, which is absolutely part of why I am making these paintings," said Edelstein, whose husband, Robert Russell, is also an artist. "Robert and I have gone to countless art shows over the 14 years we’ve been together, and we’ve seen a lot of identity-based work. All of the various identities were demanding representation within the larger human story. And not just representation — celebration. But not Jews. Where are the Jews?"

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Gail Wise bought the first Ford Mustang sold in the United States; 60 years later, she still owns it

 

     In the spring of 1964, Gail Wise taught third grade at Sunnyside Elementary School in Berkeley, Illinois, a small suburb just east of Elmhurst. She was still Gail Brown then, loved her job, but it was a dozen miles south from where she lived with her parents in Park Ridge.
     "Back then you lived at home until you got married," she remembered. 

     At 22 years old, she couldn't expect to drive her parents' car forever. She needed her own.
     So on Wednesday, April 15, 1964, she and her father went to Johnson Ford on Cicero Avenue in Chicago — her family always drove Fords. Her father had driven a '57 Fairlane 500, then a '63 Thunderbird.
     "My parents always drove a convertible," she said. "I just knew I wanted a convertible."
     But there were no convertibles on the showroom floor. When the salesman saw Brown's disappointment, he took pity on her, and said they had something special in back. They weren't supposed to sell it yet, but she could take a look. He pulled a tarp off a Mustang convertible in "Skylight Blue." No Mustangs would officially go on sale for two days, until after it was unveiled at the New York World's Fair on April 17. If she wanted this one, she'd have to buy it without a test drive. She did want it. 

     "I just fell in love. It was sporty. It had the bucket seats, the transmission on the floor," she said. "He started it up. It went zoom zoom and made that nice, loud noise. I was just so excited to buy it. I was in heaven. I told the salesman it was for me."
     Some aspects of the car might surprise today — the Mustang had seat belts in the front seats but not the back. The passenger seat could not be adjusted. Back-up lights were optional.
     The price was $3,447.50. Her salary was $5,000 a year. Her father loaned her the money.
     Making Gail Wise the first person in the United States to buy a Ford Mustang — 60 years ago on Monday.
     "When I drove out of the showroom, nobody had seen this car yet," she recalled. "Everybody was waving at me, asking me to slow down, so they could see this car. I felt like a movie star. I was very happy. I drove it to school the next day. All those boys, the seventh and eighth graders, were hovering over it."
     She drove that Mustang for 15 years. She married Tom Wise, an electronics technician who worked on the guidance system on a nuclear submarine in the Navy, in 1966. The couple moved to Charleston, South Carolina. Their four kids arrived, and she gave up teaching.
     "When you were married, you started a family and stayed home with the children," she said.

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Flashback 1995: "Ito unlikely to leave, experts say."

A courtroom scene, by José Guadalupe Posada (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     O.J. Simpson's body had scarcely begun to singe in hell before readers wondered when I'd be weighing in on the subject. Never, I hope. I hated the case while it was going on, the omnipresence, the sensationalism. Plus I wasn't yet a columnist, so only wrote about it as an assignment, covering some local reaction to a trial development. I wouldn't share this except for Northwestern professor Dan Polsby's sharp closing quote, which is worthy of remembrance. Polsby left NU in 1999 and joined Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, retiring in 2020.

     Chicago legal experts regard the possibility of Judge Lance Ito stepping down from the O.J. Simpson trial as just the latest bit of empty theater in a trial that seems to grow stranger and stranger. Few think he will declare a mistrial.
     "Given the investment that everybody has in the trial, I seriously doubt he will" recuse himself, said Dan Polsby, a professor of law at Northwestern University Law School.
     Questions of a judge's possible conflict of interest are rare, and usually are settled without the judge stepping down. Ito did disqualify himself Tuesday from ruling on the tapes of Mark Fuhrman insulting Ito's wife.
     "Contrary to popular opinion, this is not the first trial in history," said Tom Scorza, a former assistant U.S. attorney. "Many times problems develop between a judge and a given witness, particularly a police witness."
     Typically, in matters of bias the judge is concerned with how an appeals court will view a situation, Scorza said. But a Simpson appeal based on bias is unlikely because the judge's possible bias is against a prosecution witness. If Simpson is found guilty, to argue the judge was biased against a witness whose testimony helped convict him doesn't make sense. And if he is found not guilty, there is no need to appeal.
     Area lawyers tend to be critical of Ito, who they say should never have let Fuhrman's racial beliefs become part of the trial.
     "Let's assume he is a racist: So what?" said Patricia Bobb, a trial lawyer and former prosecutor. "Does that establish the fact he planted evidence? The law of evidence is you can't impeach people on collateral matters. Ito is facing a problem he created."
     Bobb said perhaps having Ito step down might not be such a bad thing.
     Northwestern's Dan Polsby seems to agree.
     "This trial is a scale model of eternity," he said. "The O.J. Simpson case looks like it's going to go on until the heat death of the universe."

            —Originally published in the Sun-Times Aug. 16, 1995