Rattling the cup

     So we moved my mother and father, a week ago Monday. The next day I asked my mother how she liked the new place.
     "I'm not getting my paper," she complained.
     Ah, right, the paper. Did not take care of that. But I will, immediately, I told her. Jumped online to use the subscriber app. It's hard enough to change the address of your own subscription, never mind someone else's, and I was thwarted.
     But I had a Plan B. Last year we donated our van to the paper, and I got to know our membership director. She owed me a favor. Perhaps, I asked, she could point me toward someone who could change my mother's subscription. She did, and it was handled easily. While she had my attention, however, she said, in effect, You know ... we've been sending out these emails, fundraising, and perhaps you'd like to write one. For World Press Freedom Day, Friday. This was, oh, Wednesday.
     Too soon. Next time, I said, not wanting to rush something out half-baked. Not really wanting to do it at all. But she asked nicely, so gave the old Boy Scout try and wrote this:

Dear reader:

Almost 40 years ago, I visited the Chicago public high school located in Cook County Jail so incarcerated teens could go to school. One lesson I watched taught where to put the stamp on an envelope. Later I asked the teacher: is this really necessary? He looked at me pityingly and replied that while students here may have killed someone, may have fathered children, they often did not know where the stamp goes because they'd never written a letter because they can't read.

That stuck with me, and decades later I decided to go back and check up on the place. Yes, I'd written about it before, but no readers rattle the paper and say: "Hey...I read about this 30 years ago!" The Chicago Public Schools didn't want to let me return. But I kept badgering them. Finally, they relented, and when I went back I found out why they didn't want me there, after several teachers pulled me aside and said that, trying to goose the numbers, the school was graduating students who had left the jail long ago. Some had died. The inspector general investigated for a year. The principal was fired.

Exposing corruption and making changes is the heart of what the Sun-Times does, and what gets mentioned on days like World Press Freedom Day. While that's crucial and I'm all for it, done by others, in my career here — now in its fifth decade — I've always emphasized the visit-interesting-places part. To show readers something they didn't know was there. So I've gone down the Deep Tunnel and up the western spire of 875 N. Michigan, then the John Hancock Building, with the workmen changing the lightbulbs on the antennae. I've watched a heart transplanted, a manhole cover forged, and Wilco record a song. It's important to uncover hard truths and confront the powerful with them. But it's also good to have institutional memory and to go places, uncover intriguing truths and share them: the first blood bank in the world opened in Chicago, as did the first public school for children with disabilities. To pray toward Mecca in Chicago, you face northeast.

SUPPORT A FREE PRESS

This is a very long way of saying that my daily column, which has appeared for 28 continual years in the Sun-Times, shines a light in the odd corners, sometimes afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. Sometimes merely being interesting, which is also important. While my colleagues uncover corruption and hold elected officials' feet to the fire, I'm wondering where Fresca went during COVID, who opens Cologuard jars, and what goes on at the dominatrix dungeon on Lake Street, three blocks from the governor's office. One column examined how blind people pick up after their dogs. 

Asking questions that readers might never think to ask, but nevertheless enjoy learning about. I've always found Chicago an infinitely fascinating place, and feel lucky to be able to explore it three times a week in the Chicago Sun-Times. People who don't read the paper literally do not know what they're missing — theirs is a smaller, drier, blander, paler, scarier world. 

Since October 2022, the Chicago Sun-Times has been community-supported, funded by readers like you. If you haven't contributed to the paper, please consider doing so — reflect on how much poorer the city would be without us, not just the crimes that would go undetected, but the wonders that would go unheralded. Then dig deep. To me, you need the Sun-Times the way people need glasses: in order to see properly. You'd think nothing of spending a few hundred dollars on an extra pair. I hope you consider contributing the same to Chicago's preeminent newspaper for the past 76 years. Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely, 

Neil Steinberg
Columnist
Chicago Sun-Times

     That brought in thousands of dollars. But more importantly, to me anyway, a cascade of letters like this:

Hi Neil,

I don't have much, but I wanted you to know I just donated to the Sun-Times because of you.
When I lived & worked in Chicago, the Times was my favorite paper and you were my favorite columnist.

I thought it only fair to show a little respect.

Thanks, Neil.
You have taught me & entertained me a lot.
peace,
Eric R.
Kissimmee, Florida

     Maybe I'm a little shell-shocked lately. But there was something very moving in seeing people I'd never met dig into their pockets, inspired by my column, and say nice stuff on top of it. Anyway, thanks to everybody who pitched in or is going to pitch in. They gave out the Pulitzers on Monday — never getting one of those. But these emails were a suitable consolation. Odd to think it all came about from getting my mother's paper delivered to her new address.

Yo-yos are back, someday, maybe

Boys in a Chicago schoolyard play with yo-yos. (Photo for the Sun-Times by Bob Kotalik)

     My wife sleeps late while I wake early.
     "I'm going to walk the dog," I explained a few weeks back, after she stirred while I was putting on my shoes.
     "Do you have a yo-yo?" she asked, sleepily.
     "No," I said, puzzled, slow on the uptake, figuring she was coming out of a dream. "Why do you ask?"
     "'Walk the dog,'" she explained. Ah. A yo-yo trick.
     My next thought — I kid you not — was: I should get a yo-yo and learn tricks to entertain our future grandchildren. Then I wondered: Are there people who teach yo-yo tricks? Are yo-yos even still a thing? Or has technology completely killed them?
     "Our demographic is 6 to 15 years old," said Josh Staph, CEO and president of the Duncan Toyscq Company, manufacturer of yo-yos for nearly a century. "There's smartphones, there's TikTok. A lot of elements that can provide immediate gratification to kids. A yo-yo does not provide immediate gratification. You have to try it a few times."
     That you do. My only childhood memory of yo-yos is never being any good with them. "Walk the dog" is a trick where you throw the yo-yo down, hard, and it remains at ground level, spinning — like a dog on a leash — until you summon it back up with a snap of the wrist. My string tended to break.
     Yo-yos are another classic plaything to emerge from Chicago, along with Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs and Raggedy Ann. Not that they were invented here — basically a vertical top with the string attached, yo-yos can be traced to antiquity. Women play with yo-yos on Grecian urns.
     Donald F. Duncan was a Chicago entrepreneur in the 1920s who started a parking meter company. He visited California in 1928, where he saw Pedro Flores demonstrate a yo-yo. Flores was from the Philippines, where yo-yos were big, and had already trademarked the word "yo-yo," Tagalog for "come come." Duncan bought the rights then got busy, joining forces with newspaper titan William Randolph Hearst to get newsboys pushing yo-yos.
     Yo-yos were a craze in Chicago in the summer of 1929 — newspaper columnists complained you couldn't enter a Loop building without fighting your way through crowds gathered to watch experts perform tricks. People grew annoyed.

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Flashback 1998: Gays victimized by our silence

     

     Odd that the same year, more than a quarter century in the past — 1998 — would pop up under two completely unrelated contexts this week. Yesterday I traced the origins of "Snoopy in a blender" to a 1998 story. And today's post is prompted by a long overdue shift in policy by the United Methodist Church of Christ last week. Turns out gays are okay after all. Or at least they can serve as clergy.

     Reminiscent of "I Believe," among the funniest songs in the very funny musical "Book of Mormon," basically a rendition of actual Mormon doctrine. It contains the line, "I believe ... in 1978 God changed his mind about Black people." Really meaning that the Mormon Church changed its mind about Black people, and decided, upon 130 years of deliberation, Black ministers were okay after all.

     And now God, as represented by the United Methodist Church, has welcomed the LGBTQ community into the ranks of the chosen, i.e., themselves. A little late, surely, but better late than never. I tried to tell them back in 1998:

     I live in a gay part of town. Not the gayest — that would be about two blocks west and maybe four blocks north of our place. But gay enough. Every summer the Gay Pride Parade rolls past my block, which has a small, sedate gay bar on the corner.
     I've never been in the bar. When I pop out of the house for a beer — say, on the pretext of picking up the milk, I pass by the corner gay bar and walk another block to a straight bar, there to drink straight beer. Birds of a feather . . .
     That said, once or twice, I will admit, I have ventured into one of the local gay bars for a quick drink to see what they are like inside and to prove to myself that there is nothing to be afraid of. They served me a beer; they took the money. The TV blared. I finished my beer, unmolested, and emerged with my heterosexuality intact.
     It isn't the sort of thing I tell everyone (well, until now), but it didn't strike me as the biggest deal, either. I think it's important to not be afraid of things unnecessarily. Ignorance is fertile soil for hate.
     For instance, before I moved to the neighborhood, I had to pause to seriously ask myself whether I really wanted to live in a gay area. I worried it would become oppressive in some way I couldn't foresee. But after a little thought, I decided it probably wouldn't be a bother. And it hasn't been.
     Then again, I'm lucky. I've always felt pretty secure about myself. I don't feel threatened. Strolling with my sons through the neighborhood, I don't worry that the boys will somehow be infected by gayness. When we're on the street and a group of laughing, young, fit men — a group I assume to be gays headed toward the bars — passes, I don't shield my kids' eyes. I don't worry I'm exposing them to some toxin. The mighty edifice of heterosexuality doesn't crumble that easily, in my view. And while I'd rather my boys not grow up gay — that seems like a tough road, at least for the parents — I figure the die is pretty much cast, and I'll find out one fine day.
     None of this strikes me as extraordinary. In fact, it seems the basic attitude of liberal American decency at the end of the 20th century.
     But obviously, people must feel otherwise. The Methodist Church is holding a trial in a few months to see if the minister at the Broadway United Methodist Church — just a few blocks up from me — should be booted out of the clergy for performing a rite marrying a gay couple.
     The immediate reason — it's against the Bible — grows pale the more you look at it. Many things are banned in the Bible, from dishonoring your parents to eating lobster. Going hammer and tongs after gays, the way organized religion feels compelled to do, seems awfully selective. Why boot out just gays, and the ministers who unite them, and not, say, adulterers? Why not those who swear? They're banned, too.
     I suppose the quick answer is that gays are targeted because they can be. The Methodists can't very well toss out a minister for marrying an interracial couple, or a Methodist and a Baptist, or a liar and a thief. Gays are one of the few subgroups left that can be openly persecuted. The awning of law and custom we've built up doesn't quite cover them yet, and certain people are horrified at the thought that it someday might. Who would be left to openly loathe?
     Part of it is that the rest of society is so quiet when gays are persecuted. Yes, we cluck our tongues when young gay men are brutally murdered, as if to say, `Well, we don't want to kill them now, do we?" But the fear of being labeled gay is so strong that it is easier to be silent or look away.
     Let me get this straight: God cares about our sexuality, but not about our moral courage. Right . . .

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 27, 1998 

Note: The minister, whom I did not not name, was Rev. Gregory Dell. He was tried by the United Methodist Church in 1999, found guilty, and given a year suspension. He returned to the Broadway UMC until 2007, when he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. He and his wife moved to North Carolina, where he died in 2016.

Flashback 1998: "Snoopy in a blender"

    

Photo by "DiscoverWithDima."

     "Didn't you originate that?" my wife asked at breakfast earlier this week. "'Snoopy in a blender'?"
     She was reading about Dubuffet's 29-foot-tall, black and white monstrosity, Monument with Standing Beast, being removed from in front of the Thompson Center. I thought hard.

     "I might have been the first person to put it into print," I said. "But I think I was quoting someone else."
    Generally, claiming to be the first to coin a word or phrase is a fool's game. You're usually wrong, an earlier citation is quickly found and pinned on you like a Christmas ornament. Even if you're correct, it's a prize not worth winning. Nobody cares. I remember the pride Bob Greene took in coining ... what? "Yuppie" I think. A term that hasn't stood the test of time. It's like being proud of coming up with "daddy-O." 
     The Monument with Standing Beast Wikipedia page claims, "The sculpture is affectionately known to many Chicagoans as 'Snoopy in a blender.'" Though looking at the references cited I had to ask, incredulously, "How would they know? Did they conduct a poll?"   
      I searched "Snoopy in a blender" on the Sun-Times database and came up with the first reference in "Guide to Chicago Cruises," a fun, June 28, 1998 report written by yours truly about the various boats offering cruises from Navy Pier and the Chicago River — talk about a tough assignment. (It had to be an assignment; even I lack the chutzpah to suggest something like that: "Yeah chief, why don't I take every boat tour offered on Navy Pier? That's the ticket! And when I'm done, I can evaluate every fruity drink sold on the pier...").
     The structure of the story was sort of fun. Here's an example:

Seadog I
Owner: Sea Dog Speed Boat Rides, (312) 822-7200.
Other boat: Seadog II
Location: Navy Pier, 3rd berth
What you pay: $13
What you get: 30-minute tour with a powerful, 2,000 horsepower boat zipping around the lake at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour.
Where you go: Up to North Avenue Beach.
The good part: Loud music, the feeling of going really fast.
The bad part: Abrasive, Ed-Debevic's-waitresslike shtick on part of crew. Also, morbid thoughts of that poor woman who got her lower leg cut off.
Kids? Tots only if being punished. Great for thrill-seeking teens.
Noteworthy error in tour: Claimed the Lindbergh Beacon "guided Lindbergh into Chicago on his flight around the world."

     The line about a "poor woman" referred to Kathleen Rooney, 35, who was swimming off North Avenue Beach in 1997 when the Seadog powered over her, amputating right leg mid-calf. In 2001, a Cook County jury awarded her $10 million for her injuries.
     The guide sails aboard 14 boats — geez, I was energetic — and weighs in at nearly two thousand words. I'll spare you the details of long-vanished cruise experiences. The phrase in question is said during a tour, not off Navy Pier, but aboard Dells-like duck boats on the North Branch of the river:

Mallard
Owner: Chicago Trolley Co., (312) 461-1133.
Other boats: Huey, Louie, Howard and Disco.
Location: Clark and Ontario (the parking lot of the Rock 'n' Roll McDonald's).
What you pay: $20 for adults; $10 for kids.
What you get: a 90-minute land; water tour of the city on a World War II-vintage amphibious craft.
Where you go: Down Clark Street, through the Loop, down Michigan to Burnham Harbor, into the water down to McCormick Place, then back up Lake Shore Drive.
The good part: Friendly employees exhibit occasionally flashes of actual humor (guide referred to the Thompson Center's Dubuffet as "Snoopy in a blender.") Novelty of an amphibious vehicle.
The bad part: Faux-Letterman shtick grew weary after a while; supposed 90-minute tour clocked in at about an hour.
Kids? Just make sure they keep their arms inside when the boat passes close to those wooden uprights at the Burnham Harbor ramp.
Noteworthy error in tour: Claimed Christopher Columbus was born in Chicago, though in jest.

     It's hard to prove a negative. "Snoopy in a blender" didn't appear in the Tribune until 2014. Maybe the nameless tour guide made it up. Maybe he read it or heard it somewhere else. If the EGD Irregulars want to have at it, to try to dig up an earlier reference, well, go for it. The monstrosity first went up in 1984. It's on its way to the Art Institute of Chicago now, supposedly. But if they choose to stash it in a warehouse, well, they'll get no complaint from me. 

Student protesters hold their breath, turn blue, waiting for the intractability of Gaza to resolve itself

"Untitled, 2018," by Nick Cave.

     In an ideal world, I'd throw down my yo-yo story today, with a firm snap of the wrist. I've done my interviews and research, plus hands-on practice. There's both a strong Chicago connection, and an unanticipated tie-in to Asian American Heritage Month — "yo-yo" is Tagalog for ...
     Then again, in an ideal world, life would be proceeding uneventfully in Gaza and college students in the United States would be doing what students usually do in May: study, party, and pack their steamer trunks for home.
     But we do not live in that ideal world, obviously. Even a person as determinedly trivial as myself can't laud yo-yos with all this sound and fury across the country.
     I should say something. But what? What have I to add on this topic beyond the same unwelcome question I've been asking for years? Or as I wrote over a decade ago:
     "What happens next?
     "A child’s question, really, something naive, blurted out when the tale goes on too long. Cut to the chase, Daddy. How does the story end?
     "The last time I bothered talking to Israeli leaders in Chicago — more than two years ago — I sat down with the then consul general and trotted that question out, my device for cutting through the endless seesawing of blame. Forget blame, forget history — that’s done, the rope both sides use to play tug-of-war as the years roll by and nothing happens. Stipulate history as having occurred; what about now?"
     The students shutting down colleges coast-to-coast certainly have their candidates for what should happen, right now, before they turn blue: a cease-fire and divestment from Israel. They're so vigorously insisting this must happen, the question of whether those steps would do any good never seems to cross their minds.
     A cease-fire, while helpful for getting food to a starving population and stopping slaughter, temporarily, won't mean much if it's a brief break before the killing resumes. A cease-fire with Hamas still in power just lights the fuse on the next attack. Not a concern to protesters, some of whom don't seem to think Israel should exist in the first place — and why is that? — never mind defend itself now.
    Students can show long-term strategic thinking when it comes to their own lives— all the face coverings remind us they'll be looking for jobs in the fall — but fail at granting the empathy they lavish on themselves to anyone else.
    And disinvestment is a very long-term solution to an immediate crisis — like sitting on the curb while your house burns down, thumbing your phone, ordering fire extinguishers on Amazon.

     The hard truth is divesting wouldn't even help much down the road. Do the math. In 2023, the cumulative total of American university endowments was $839 billion. And the stock market is worth $50 trillion. Making the investments held by U.S. colleges about 1.6% of the total U.S. financial markets. So if every single American university immediately pulled every single dime of their investments from companies involved with Israel or the Israeli military, it would affect the economic health of Israel not much, and the war in Gaza even less. Years in the future.

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An apology to Mrs. Gifreda

My tulips were particularly lovely this year.

      Mrs. Gifreda lived at the end of our street, at the corner of Carteret Court and Whitehall. She had a beautiful lawn, thick like a green hairbrush, without weed or brown patch or blemish. I have a vague memory of Mrs. Gifreda crawling across this verdant carpet, deploying garden tools. Maybe a hat of some sort, tied with  a scarf. I don't believe I ever stepped on her lawn, not once in 20 years of walking past. We weren't afraid of her. We were in awe.

     That's it. I'm sure she had a first name, but never knew it, and Prof. Google is no help finding anything more now, beyond serving up a single matchbook for Gifreda Shoes, "The footwear of successful men." Perhaps she was a relation — how many Gifredas could there be in a small town? Maybe a reader in Berea, Ohio knows, but I doubt it. My sense is she was a solitary person — no husband, no family I can recall, which doesn't mean they didn't exist. A child is not a reliable witness.

    I asked my sister Debbie, older by three years, if she had any recollections of Mrs. Gifreda, and her memory mirrors mine:

   "Just how the only time I ever saw her was on her hands and knees on her lawn," she replied. "She was clearly obsessed with her lawn."   

     A common failing. Or maybe the failing was ours — the natural mistake of assuming that the visible part of other people's lives are all that's there. Maybe Mrs. Gifreda was a former WAC, with five grown kids. Maybe she baked pies and played the mandolin. We have no idea.

     While I am not obsessed with my lawn, yet, I am concerned, and people walking past my house might have seen me, on my knees, trying to get ahead of the springtime, digging up weeds, pulling the Creeping Charlie, planting grass seed — a very satisfying experience. And sometimes, if I am out there, salaaming as if in prayer, applying my energies lawnward, someone will pass by, one of the unknown persons who increasingly populate our neighborhood. 

     I do wonder how I appear to them. Weird old lawn guy. I know my house, with its piebald siding and homemade spire, sometimes frightens local children. "The Boo Radley House" is how one frank neighbor described it, referring to the enigmatic bogeyman/hero of "To Kill a Mockingbird." I bet they don't think that Mr. Lawncare has written nine books and might even write a 10th, once he gets this spurge out of his yard.

    Fastidiousness in grass nurture might not be the best thing to be remembered for. But it isn't the worst either and, despite not knowing her, I like to imagine that Mrs. Gifreda would be pleased that her diligence has taken on a life of its own, far beyond her own mortal passing. And if she actually wouldn't be pleased at seeing her life reduced to a single quality — who would? — well, my sincere apologies. 

    Correction: Through a production error, the caption of the photo atop today's blog might imply to some readers that I was somehow involved with planting the gorgeous bed of tulips depicted. While my tulips indeed did look lovely this year, those are not my tulips; they belong to the Chicago Botanic Garden. Reminding me of my favorite movie bits: Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau is checking into a hotel in a German seaside town. There is a dog resting by the clerk. "Does your dog bite?" he asks, reaching out to pet the beast. "No," the pipe-smoking clerk says simply. Clouseau reaches toward the dog's head. "Nice doggie," he says, as the beast leaps up, snarling and bites him. "I thought you said your dog did not bite!" Clouseau complains. "That is not my dog," the clerk replies.

These were the tulips in the box in front of our house.

Imaginary hells easier to escape than real ones.

A scene from "Dante: Inferno to Paradise," a film by Ric Burns.

     Dante Alighieri was in charge of widening roads in Florence at the end of the 13th century. I wish more people knew that. His masterpiece "Commedia" — the "Divine" part was tagged on much later — is so dominant in the public mind that the more practical aspects of his life are overlooked. He was a soldier, too.
     WTTW is trying to wave the flag for Dante, airing a two-part, four-hour film, "Dante: Inferno to Paradise." Several readers, knowing of my fondness for the dour Florentine poet, urged me to watch.
     Hmm ... I'm tempted to invoke Samuel Johnson's line about women delivering sermons and dogs walking on their hind legs: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."      

     My general takeaway is, as with the Dante video game, anything that puts him on the radar is good.
     That said, I don't understand why the big budget CGI movie magic put behind flogging every minor character in the Marvel universe can't be spared for a story that has stayed firmly in the public eye for over 700 years.
     The production values are adequate on "Dante: Inferno to Paradise" in the way this past season the Lyric Opera diluted the grandeur of ancient Egypt into a stained green wall and three fluorescent lights. A generous audience can overlook it; but why should we have to?
     The trouble with Dante's book is that it is written with such verisimilitude that it's easy to think of him as a guy who went to hell and took notes. The WTTW movie slides into this trench, with a sulfurous, ooo-scary mood that reminded me of "Dark Shadows," the 1960s vampire soap opera.
     Given how few readers will run to watch the movie — I haven't finished watching and probably never will — I wouldn't take up your time had not one specific date been mentioned in the program.
     For those unfamiliar, the Commedia is the story of Dante's journey through hell, up purgatory's mountain and into heaven, accompanied by the Roman poet Virgil, at the behest of Beatrice, his celestial love.

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