"Nice try, gramps."

     Nothing like free food to draw a crowd. I slid into some kind of Content Creators Corner at the Democratic National Convention not because I consider myself "a content creator" — though  did ask the doorkeeper, breezing by, "Do newspaper columnists count?" and was told we do — but because I saw they had free soft pretzels. 

      And my backyard, as you might know, has become a rolling orgy of little brown birds flapping and scrabbling around my constantly stocked bird feeder. Sometimes dozens at a time. Nor are they alone. They're are often several rabbits and two or three or four or five squirrels. I'm not happy about it but what can I do? They're hungry.

     I glanced out the kitchen window last Thursday morning and saw this bad boy. All alone. The brown bird shindig had mysteriously moved on. "About time you showed up," I muttered, admiring his fierce hunter's profile. He'd thin the herd.  

     Wrong. No sooner had I snapped this photo — not that good, through the window at a distance — when a development entered, stage left. A young squirrel who had obviously been asleep during the lesson about not being eaten, nudged into the frame and began poking around the seed husks under the feeder, looking for seeds that had fallen to the ground. Those brown birds, in their frenzy, are sloppy eaters. 

    "This'll be quick," I thought, anticipating what was to come. But it wasn't. To be honest, the hawk seemed to barely notice the squirrel. Then he did. It looked like this:

     If ever a hawk had easy pickings, this had to be it. But hawks are designed to dive bomb prey from a great height. This narrow gap didn't allow him to get up a head of steam. Plus there was the obstacle of the feeder, whose anti-squirrel defenses — a baffle and length of PVC pipe — you may now pause to admire 

    When the hawk made its move, it turned out that little squirrel was not so oblivious after all. He bolted under the protection of the fire pit, and some kindling stacked around it, while the hawk flopped and flapped after him, quite ineffectively.

     The amazing part was that the squirrel didn't even wait for the hawk to go away. After the encounter, he was back nosing the seed leavings as if to say, "Nice try gramps." The hawk flew off, no doubt disgusted with himself, in search of less nimble prey.

Brandon Johnson salutes his past while looking toward the future

     It's Monday morning. In a few hours, he will address thousands of Democrats gathered at the United Center and millions more tuning into the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
     But right now, Mayor Brandon Johnson is at Walter H. Dyett High School for the Arts, at 555 E. 51st St., about to speak to a few dozen people. He stands poised by the steps to a small platform.
     "They're coming for him!" Jitu Brown, national director of Journey for Justice, a coalition of grassroots educational organizations, tells the gathering. Brown, who led a 34-day hunger strike in 2015 to reopen Dyett, prowls the stage, invoking faceless forces set against the mayor.
     "Because they want him to privatize. They want him to privatize," Brown says. "They don't want him to love Black and Brown children. They were silent when they were closing over 160 schools in this city. ... They don't get to decide no more. Kwame Nkrumah said this: 'It is better to govern or misgovern yourself than to be governed by anybody else.'"
     With that two-edged maxim tossed out, the man trying to govern the sprawling city of Chicago as it welcomes one president, two candidates, thousands of delegates and protesters, not to forget all the other daily doings of a major city, takes the podium.
     "I'm grateful that we have come together to fortify our position as we push for sustainable community schools to be the model throughout our entire school district," says Johnson, who joined the 2015 Dyett hunger strike on its 24th day. "This model is not simply about teachers and teachers' assistants; it's also about the families who make up the community."
     Party politics might be about to push Johnson onto the world stage, but first Johnson takes the time to go to Bronzeville and give some love to a cause dear to his heart.
     "Sustainable community schools" is a major Chicago Teachers Union effort to remake the public schools so rather than compete for scarce magnet slots, students attend schools in their own neighborhoods with curriculum that will, in the CTU's words, "humanize education in a way that is antiracist and advances equity and justice."
     It's a message Johnson is eager to share with the world. Earlier, at the Chicago Hilton, 720 S. Michigan Ave., Johnson told a Michigan delegation breakfast that politicians need to put public money where their mouths are.

To continue reading, click here.

Chicago convention history is hardly conventional

Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery

     I had two scene-setters in the Sunday paper. The first, posted Sunday, was on how the Democratic National Convention might affect the city's battered reputation. This is the second, a quickstep through Chicago's convention history.

     The nation was falling apart. The agricultural South, having forced the United States at its birth into a devil’s bargain, had no intention of abandoning the highly profitable ancient evil. They invoked God, the Bible, science and common sense when explaining why slavery had to continue forever.
     But the North could no longer accept Southern sheriffs infiltrating their cities, seizing free Blacks and dragging them back to bondage. The 1860 election was seen as a crossroads. Not in liberating the South — that wasn’t even on the table, initially — but determining the future of the unfinished West.
     Would the seven territories between Missouri and the Pacific allow slavery? Would the South get the respect they craved? The Democrats, meeting in Charleston, couldn’t even settle on a consensus candidate: the party ended up nominating two different candidates at two different conventions. Their confusion seemed an opportunity for the new Republican Party, formed out of the ashes of the Revolutionary War era Whigs.
     Where should Republicans hold their convention? Chicago had a burgeoning industrial city, with a population of 110,000 — making it the country’s ninth-largest, not half the size of Baltimore. No big shakes. So why here? And no, not because of Abraham Lincoln. He wasn’t even a consideration; had he been, the convention might have ended up elsewhere.
     Part of Chicago’s allure was that it wasn’t an Eastern city. Holding the convention on the coast would “run a big chance of losing the West.” Plus, then as now, Chicago was good at receiving guests.

Hotel rooms and railroads

     “Essentially Chicago had the infrastructure in 1860 in terms of railroads and hotel rooms,” said Ed Achorn, author of “The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History.”
     “Illinois was also a vital swing state in the election, and the convention would help promote the party. But the site also appealed to the executive committee of the Republican National Committee because members believed it was neutral ground. No serious candidate in their view came from Illinois. William Seward, Edward Bates, Salmon Chase, and Simon Cameron were deemed the big contenders. Lincoln was considered a veep possibility at best.”
     Chicago wasn’t really neutral ground. Lincoln’s homegrown forces knew the political terrain very well. While Seward’s New York supporters were parading a brass band around the Wigwam, the impressive log convention hall built where Lake and Wacker meet today, Lincoln’s team filled the balcony reserved for spectators.
     Chicago would host 24 more Democratic and Republican national conventions, including three years when both parties held their conventions here. Most — 22 — were in the century between 1860 and 1960, when the city held its last Republican Convention and nominated Richard M. Nixon for the first time. We’ve held only three since, counting the 2024 Democratic National Convention, commencing here Aug. 19.

To continue reading, click here.

Looking back at a convention when conventions really meant something

Franklin D. Roosevelt heading toward the Democratic National Convention at the Chicago Stadium in 1932.

     The Democratic National Convention begins Monday. It's a big deal, supposedly, even though its central purpose is long gone. Starting in 1831, and for 125 years, votes were taken, alliances made, deadlocks broken.
     The last contested convention was the Republican Convention in 1964. In 1972, voters assumed the task, in primaries. Now conventions are publicity extravaganzas — four-day infomercials — promoting what has already been decided.

     What were they like previously? I just re-read "Happy Days Are Here Again: The 1932 Democratic Convention, the Emergence of FDR — and How America Was Changed Forever" by Steve Neal, a political columnist at the Sun-Times who died in 2004. He delighted in this stuff, had deep knowledge and wide connections. This was his last book, and it's a gripping read even if you know how it ends.
     In the summer of 1932, the nation was mired in the Great Depression. Chicago was paying its teachers in scrip. Still, politics then resembled politics now.
     "It's pretty hard to exaggerate the bitterness here," a columnist wrote. "Names are called, accusations made, treachery charged, and discreditable stories spread."
     Herbert Hoover was the aloof Republican president, refusing to aid his suffering nation. He seemed a sitting duck, and the chance to defeat him was up for grabs.
     Neal focuses on FDR, but there are a half dozen others who could have also become the nominee: cigar-chewing, derby-hatted Alfred E. Smith, the "Happy Warrior" who had lost in 1924 and 1928; Huey Long, the "Kingfish" who brazenly took 10% percent of the salaries of all public employees in Louisiana, because he could; John Nance Garner, aka "Cactus Jack;" Albert Ritchie, Maryland's four-term governor and former Secretary of War Newton Baker, seen as the man who would swoop in if FDR stumbled.
     And stumble Roosevelt did, especially in trying to eliminate the "two-third rule" that prevented him, with a simple majority of delegates, from cakewalking into the nomination on the first ballot.
     "If FDR is nominated, it will certainly prove there is no limit to the amount of fumbling one can do and still win a game," future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter wrote.
     Giants roamed the city. Comedian Will Rogers covered the convention, as did novelist John Dos Passos. H.L. Mencken and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. went into a Loop speakeasy where the Bard of Baltimore took objection to the crooner.
     "Finally, Mencken said to the young lady behind the bar, 'I'd like to shoot that son of a bitch,'" Lodge, a future diplomat and senator, recalled. "'The young lady did not bat an eye ... She reached under the counter, pulled out a Thompson submachine gun, laid it on the counter, and with a condescending fluttering of her eyelids said, indifferently, 'Go ahead.'"

To continue reading, click here.









Earl B. Dickerson, a Black University of Chicago-trained lawyer, appeared before the all-white Resolutions Committee to press for a civil rights plank. "He asked his party to take a firm stand 'against discrimination by reason of race, creed or color as being outdated, barbarous and un-American,'" Neal wrote. It didn't work but reminds us how far we had to come to see a woman of color run for president.

"A wonder to a stranger"

     The paper asked me to write a scene-setter for Sunday's paper about how the convention might affect the image of the city. This is what I came up with.

     Welcome to Chicago!
     The crime-ridden, blood-soaked dystopian nightmare we call home. Stroll down Michigan Avenue, past the shuttered shops and the brazen thieves boldly pilfering luxury goods, confident the police won’t arrest them and the state’s attorney wouldn’t prosecute them if they did ...
     Whoops, that isn’t true.
     Chicago, glittering vacationland, home of the blues and deep-dish pizza, birthplace of the skyscraper. A center for art — the location of Picasso’s only monumental sculpture, plus our beloved Bean, the shiniest, beaniest, most instantly beloved artwork on earth. We rose from the ashes and held the greatest fair of all time, so certainly we can hold another Democratic National Convention, our 27th major party convention, if you count the Progressive Party in 1912.
     So which is it? When the balloons drop Aug. 22 — I almost said “when the smoke clears” — what will be left of Chicago’s reputation? Another boost for sweet home Chicago, celebrated in song, cynosure of American life? Or will it be more body blows for the punching bag of the Western world?

‘Chicago can handle a big event’
     Chicago boosters are confident the city will shine.
     “I believe Chicago is going to be a star,” said Guy Chipparoni, whose Res Publica Group promotes Lollapalooza and other big-ticket festivals. “Chicago can handle a big event.”
     That much is true. From a purely attendance perspective, Chicago holds numerous trade shows that are bigger deals than the DNC — the city expects 50,000 guests at the convention, but the National Restaurant Show last May drew 58,000, and the vast majority, like the millions of visitors who come here, aren’t mugged in any fashion worse than paying $13 for a can of Bud at Wrigley Field.
     Chicago has been wowing convention visitors since Lincoln’s debut.
     The city “is a wonder to a stranger,” wrote Simon P. Hanscom, editor of the Washington National Republican and a friend of Lincoln, noting “its broad avenues, magnificent buildings, splendid shops and fine private residences.”

To continue reading, click here.

Saturday pinch hitter — Jack Clark: "Chicago 1968 and a few other DNCs"

     Former cabbie and current detective novelist Jack Clark has long been a friend of this blog. With the Democratic National Convention bearing down, he offers up memories of previous conventions. Jack is the author of Hack Writing & Other Stories, a a collection of 17 of his Reader pieces from 1975 to 2001.

     Years later--I’m not sure when this happened--I decided that my father had actually died in 1969. I probably had too many memories in the space reserved for 1968.
     The year starts for me at the very beginning of February with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. I had a hard time turning the page on a photograph of a very large pile of dead U.S. soldiers in the back of an open-bed truck. Many of them looked to be my age—the same age as my friend Phil who was there with the Marines. 2100 U.S. soldiers would die in the attacks, which were a turning point in the war. Before the year was out nearly 17,000 U.S. soldiers would die. It was the worst toll in that long war.
     At the end of March, President Johnson announced that he would not seek a second term. The war was tearing the country apart. From now on, we would have to do it without him. Maybe that would stop the chant: Hey, hey, LBJ how many kids did you kill today?
     Later that same week, my father and I watched Martin Luther King’s last speech. King told the striking sanitation workers in Memphis that he had been to the mountaintop. “I may not get there with you,” he said at the very end of the speech. “But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”
     He was assassinated less than 24-hours later.
     I saw the beginning of the West Side riots the next day in front of Austin High School where I was a student. A police car was overturned in the intersection of Pine and West End Avenue, just south of the school. A police officer fired a shot into the air. Those were the final sparks.
     I was with a few hundred other white students at the north end of the block. We were soon fleeing west. Thousands of black students, who had come on a march from schools all over the West Side, headed east causing havoc as they went, and that night the West Side burned. And that was pretty much the end of the neighborhood I’d known my entire life. After the riots, the question changed from Are you moving or staying? to When are you moving?
     My father was already back in the hospital. We could see the West Side burning from his room.
     In June, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.
     My father’s 50th birthday was in August, ten days before the Democratic Convention came to town. His friends threw him a big party in one of their downtown offices. Looking back, I realize it was what we now call a living wake.
     My family, like many others, often talked politics around the dinner table. The war in Vietnam and Civil Rights were the big discussions that decade. By 1968, most of us were against the war. I’m pretty sure my father had been against it from the very beginning. My parents were Henry Wallace/Adlai Stevenson liberals. When the first black family moved in around the corner, my mother baked them a cake, carried it over, rang their bell, and introduced herself.
     On the front porch one day, my father told me something prophetic about race relations. “Black people are always going to have a hard time in this country,” he said. “A bigot might see a man walking down the street and think he looks Jewish. As much as he hates Jews, he has to be careful because he’s not really sure. But when he sees a black man, he doesn’t have to be careful about anything. He knows.”
     My father and his mother came to Chicago from New York when he was 10. He never met his own father. He lived all over Chicago, south, north, and west, and knew it well. He met my mother in night school at Austin High School, and then went all the way through college and law school at night while working full time. He took several years out for Army service during World War II. When he passed the bar in 1951, he already had four children. Three more were yet to come.
     It was his idea that I should volunteer to work at the 1968 convention. His mother had worked at the Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933, (No. Not as a fan dancer.) and he spent most of the summer he turned 15 there. He had good memories of being in the middle of such an historic affair. He thought being a page would be a good experience for me.
     My friend John and I had wanted to get to the convention center at the
     International Amphitheater but we didn’t have enough clout and got stuck at the Conrad Hilton. The other pages were all college kids. We were still in high school.
     The hippies and war protesters were across the street in Grant Park. The National Guard Troops were on Michigan Avenue and in jeeps covered with barbed wire frames. The Chicago police were everywhere. I was 18 years old. I had no idea what was going on, although I’m sure I could have done a pretty decent impersonation of someone who did. My favorite hippie chant was: Fuck you LBJ. Fuck you LBJ. It would go on and on. You could understand every word blocks away. I’d never heard anything like it—not out there for the entire world to hear. They didn’t like LBJ’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey either, the man who became the nominee that year. Dump the hump, was another chant and I agreed. I was working for the hump but I was rooting for Eugene McCarthy. He was staying across the street at the Blackstone Hotel.
     I remember leading a couple of delegates to their rooms. Other than that, I have no ideas what our duties were. I know John and I spent quite a bit of time a few floors down where Bobby Kennedy’s people were in mourning. We’d hide our Humphrey credentials and try to talk with any college girl we could find. I’m pretty sure we never told them we were in high school. When security got tighter, we were exposed as Humphrey workers and barred from the floor.
     But the Hilton turned out to be the action-filled assignment. We watched parts of the Battle of Michigan Avenue, between war protesters and the Chicago Police, first on live TV and then hanging out the 8th floor windows of the Hilton Hotel. The Walker Report would later characterize the battle as “a police riot.”
     After the last hippie had been beaten, tear-gassed, and dragged away by the police, John and I hurried down eight flights of stairs and went outside to view the battlefield. Michigan Avenue was littered with assorted pieces of clothing, shoes without partners, sleeves torn off shirts. The heavy scent of tear gas was still in the air, and that’s about as far as my memory goes. There must have been blood but, more than 50 years later, I can’t say I actually saw any of it. I know that when we tried to get back into the hotel, we couldn’t. I think they were afraid of a hippie counterattack. Our Humphrey credentials were no longer enough. Now we needed a room key.
     We ended up in a long line for the pay phone across the street in the parking lot of the Essex Hotel. It was mostly kids calling their parents collect to let them know that they’d survived. One of them said his father was the governor or maybe the lieutenant governor of Connecticut, something like that. When our turn came, we called upstairs and had someone come down with a key.
     Ramparts Magazine published a daily wall poster newspaper at the convention. I’d saved every issue. “Up Against the Wall,” it said on the top left, and that’s exactly where I intended to put them in my bedroom at home. When we were getting ready to leave on the last night, I opened the drawer where I’d stashed them, and every single issue was gone. Who would be that low down and dirty? I never figured it out.
     That was the end of August. My father died less than three weeks later. He’d been in and out of the hospital for more than a year.
     I don’t think we ever talked about the convention. By the time it was over, the relatives were coming in from out of town.
     I must have gone to the hospital once or twice in those final weeks. I hope I did. But the truth is, I went as little as possible. I told myself it was too painful to see him in that condition. I have long since realized it’s not your pain you should be worrying about when someone close is dying.
     I sometimes think 1968 must have been a particularly bad year to die. The country and Chicago were both in turmoil. It was a troublesome time. And he would never know how it all turned out, how the country and the city got through it, or if they ever did.
     On the other hand, he was spared the Nixon years.
     My father attended the 1952 and the 1956 Democratic conventions, which were also held at the International Amphitheater. Adlai Stevenson was nominated at each, and went on to lose to the Eisenhower/Nixon ticket both times.
     In 1956, my father Vincent Clark and his law school friend Patrick Nee were at the convention on the final night. They stayed to the very end and then grabbed one of the decorations on the way out the door. It was a sturdy five-point, canvas-covered star, about six feet by six feet, built with two by fours. They tied it on top of Pat’s old Packard and started for the West Side.
     The Congress Expressway (now the Eisenhower) wouldn’t open for years. But sections of it were already completed. Signs said: Drive At Your Own Risk. They probably thought this was the perfect route, a couple of young attorneys turned desperados, on the run with a pilfered star. That’s where they ran out of gas. Pat got the car off to the side. My father grabbed a gas can and went off in search of a station.
     He found a cop somewhere or, more than likely, the cop found him. He got gas and the cop gave him a ride back to the car. Along the way, my father talked the cop into giving Pat a hard time. The cop turned on his flashing lights, pulled behind the Packard and shined his spotlight in the window. He got out and began to interrogate Pat about what he was doing with a star on top of his car. Where’d you get the star, buddy?
     It was a great joke and anytime someone asked about the star, which moved around our house for years, my father got to tell it all over again. Pat was a good sport, a big guy with a twinkle in his eye. We kids all loved him. He died even younger than my father.
     So all this is a way to say, I’ve got Chicago conventions in my blood. But I’m going to have to miss this one. I’ll be in France visiting the lovely Hélène, the light of my life these last 14 years. I’m sure we’ll catch some of it on TV, especially if it’s anything like 1968. The French love that kind of stuff.
     Have fun without me. And if you happen to see a loose memento lying about don’t be afraid to grab it. But don’t steal someone else’s. Those Up Against the Wall Posters would have been in tatters long ago, if I’d managed to get them home. But I would have had a lot of fun with them through the years, moving them from one apartment to the next, from one wall to another. If people happened to ask about them, it would have given me a chance to tell some stories. Who knows? Maybe if I had, I would remember more today.
     There are those who say that when history is being made it’s best to be somewhere far away. On the other hand, if you manage to survive, you’ll always be able to look back and say, “I was there,” even after you’ve forgotten almost all of it.

 

Summer's not over (yet); a conversation with Germany's 'Dr. Beer'

Dr. Marc Rauschmann, with hops plants.

     The second half of August, already? Geez, that was fast. Summer, still, but also one of those moments when you find yourself teetering at the top of that first steep hill on the roller coaster. You can see the entire amusement park spread out around you. Take a good look, because it's a quick plunge, a few rises and falls, a few hard turns, until we come to a jarring stop at autumn.
     Did you have a good summer? I detailed the highlight of mine on Wednesday — my older son's wedding. Otherwise, mostly work, trips to the Botanic Garden and the YMCA. Gardening was a disaster, again. My tomatoes are little hard green balls of shame.
     At least there was the comfort of cherries. Great this year, if pricey. The Northwest Cherry Growers credit perfect weather.
     What else? I did indulge in light summertime reading, racing through the last few volumes in Robert Galbraith's C.B. Strike mystery series. My wife is a big mystery fan, and after years of touting the books, written by J.K. Rowling under a pen name, I dove in, warming immediately to one-legged shamus Cormoran Strike and his resourceful sidekick Robin Ellacott. The author of the Harry Potter books certainly can write, and these books are also a window into her psyche. Rowling spends her days decrying trans women on X, and they appear as some of the more loathsome characters in the Strike novels.
     Strike is a classic noir detective — hard-drinking, fast with his fists. But in the later books he goes on a diet and starts drinking NA beer, which has been booming in recent years. NA beer can be seen as reaching a new level of acceptability when fictional detectives start drinking it.
     Once, the choice was O'Doul's or nothing. Now there's half an aisle of NA beer at Binny's. When I was in Boston, my cousin's wife brought me a Woodland Farms Brewery Pointer Non-Alcoholic IPA that was so delicious I looked into having the stuff shipped. Though honestly Clausthaler is good enough for me.
     The Radeberger Gruppe, which launched Clausthaler in 1979 and claims it is the first NA beer (a distinction I'd give Prohibition era near beer), dangled their brewmaster at me. I bit.
     What does Clausthaler taste like?
     "It's full-bodied beer," said Dr. Marc Rauschmann, on a Zoom call from Germany. "A slight sweetness from the malt, from the sugar. We have a moderate bitterness, a good bitterness."
     I told him that a moderate, good bitterness is exactly what I strive for.
     "We have a higher bitterness, but because of the sweetness it's a very good balanced beer," he continued. "You don't taste a very aggressive bitterness. You taste the bitterness, but it's very pleasant."
     This is because it's brewed to be no alcohol, he said, while other NAs remove the alcohol later, leading to "empty tasting, low bodied" beers.
     Speaking of Heineken 0.0, that leads to what I know is the central puzzlement among regular beer drinkers regarding NA beer: If you don't get a buzz, why bother? Several reasons. To me, it tastes good, it's better than a glass of water and fewer calories than soda. It approximates the beer experience, and nobody ever regrets drinking NA beer.

To continue reading, click here.