"Chicago native repairs a ladder aboard USS Abraham Lincoln"

     You can't be too careful in this job.
     An email arrived from the Navy on Dec. 18. I always glance at those, because you never know what they're offering. I once got a fun column because a Romeoville native was made captain of the Zumwalt, "a slab-sided techno-iceberg" of a ship. I got to interview the captain, and even tracked down a biography of Zumwalt, so I could know about the guy this ultra cool-looking vessel was named for. I didn't use any of it, but I might have, and I felt thorough, flipping through the book. Thoroughness is important. Tuck that away.
    This particular email was the exact opposite of a futuristic battleship. The email subject line was: "Chicago native repairs a ladder aboard USS Abraham Lincoln deployed in the Pacific Ocean." 
     Can you get more humble than that? This is all the information the Navy provided:

      241213-N-OR861-1053 PACIFIC OCEAN (Dec. 13, 2024) Boatswain’s Mate Seaman Apprentice Angel Garcia assists Boatswain’s Mate 3rd Class Corion Black, left, from Chicago, repair a ladder aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72). Abraham Lincoln, flagship carrier of Carrier Strike Group Three, is underway conducting routine operations in the U.S. 3rd Fleet area of operations. As an integral part of U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. 3rd Fleet operates naval forces in the Indo-Pacific in addition to providing realistic and relevant training necessary to flawlessly execute our Navy’s timeless roles of sea control and power projection. U.S. 3rd Fleet works in close coordination with other numbered fleets to provide commanders with capable, ready forces to deploy forward and win in day-to-day competition, in crisis, and in conflict. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Zoe Simpson)

     You probably did not read that and think, "Christmas!" But the holiday was a week away. Exactly the season when those who protect our nation, aboard ships on the other side of the world, should be welcomed into the warmth of our hearts, at least metaphorically. It's hard to be far from home, and harder at the holidays, when mom's home cooking is replaced by glop  slapped onto a steel tray with a big spoon.
     So I asked the Navy to put me in touch with Boatswain Mate 3rd Class Black's mother — who I assumed was sighing and trimming the tree, thinking of Corion on the other side of the globe. Or his father, or cousin — not everyone has the cliche family. Somebody back in Chicago.
     The Navy got right on it. But couldn't do that, they told me. Okay, I said — improvise, adapt, overcome, it isn't just the Marines — how about direct communication with the sailor? We lose the element of surprise, but so be it. Perhaps he would say something interesting. Safety is important on a ship. Those ladders have to stay put. We could talk about that.

     The navy could not serve him up, either. Honestly, sometimes I'm surprised the ships manage to float.
    But I am not without resources. I fired up the internet contraption, and quickly found ... oh look at that ... Carrier Strike Group Three returned to its San Diego home port after a five-month deployment on Dec. 17. The day before the email went out. So not "deployed in the Pacific Ocean" any longer. A rather germane bit of information. You would think the Navy would tuck that tidbit into their press release instead of suggesting they were way the hell over in the Indo-Pacific Ocean. You would think they would care. Because I certainly care.

     I had mentioned the story to my bosses, and they were ready to splash the Boatswain Mate 3rd Class on the front page of the paper. Which would lose its oomph if I took out a violin to serenade him on the far side of the world when in reality he was back here at home watching Netflix. Having made my share of gaffes, just that thought — Sailor Black, rhapsodized as serving his country in the Pacific on Christmas in the Sun-Times on Wednesday morning, intead pops up Wednesday afternoon to say he's home on leave in Chatham, or wherever, and didn't they all get a laugh when the Sun-Times, which is supposed to be a newspaper, suggested otherwise. Fake news!

      So good that I checked. No harm done. Still. Turning our attention to the Navy Office of Community Outreach, well, c'mon guys, do better. You should not be dangling embarrassing gaffes at hardworking journalists whose only sin is paying attention to your emails. Check to see the boat you're ballyhooing is still afloat, and in the general vicinity where you suggest it is to be found. You're supposed to be building goodwill for the Navy. Not scuttling it. 

Newberry Library spotlights 'invisible labor' of Chicago immigrants

Curt Teich's citizenship papers.

     Immigrants are often hidden. Living in neighborhoods you don't visit, doing unheralded jobs. A pint of strawberries lists the origin of the fruit but not of who picked it. Your hospital bill lists every procedure but ignores where the medical staff tending to you came from. We will never really know how vital immigrants are to our country until the incoming administration starts plucking them off the street and deporting them. Assuming Donald Trump does what he promises, always an iffy proposition.
     This is nothing new. If you look at old postcards in a thrift store, nothing says, "Made by German immigrants in Chicago." Beautifully bound books don't credit, "Sewn by Bohemians."
     Which was a big problem for Jill Gage, custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing at the Newberry Library — her title, in the vernacular, means the person who wrangles the library's extensive collection of posters, handbills, catalogs, books, typefaces and other printed material, which includes bus tickets and sheet music.
     When she set out to curate the latest exhibition at the Newberry, "Making an Impression: Immigrant Printing in Chicago," she started by looking at what the Newberry doesn't have.
     "I wanted to think about what we don't see in the collection so much," she told me, when we met to walk through the small but significant show at the library's Hanson Gallery. "I wanted to poke at the collection and think about printing from a different angle."
     Some people might know Chicago is the former printing capital of the nation, between R.R. Donnelley churning out Yellow Pages and Rand McNally making maps. But there was also Curt Teich, who came from Germany for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and noticed a need for postcards.
     "If you had to think about the most important printer in the history of Chicago, I would say Curt Teich," Gage said. "He really brought the postcard industry to the U.S. It really opened up this huge part of American culture."
     The Newberry has 3 million postcards, and the Teich collection includes fascinating production material, plus the family archive, including their all-important citizenship papers. Finding Teich was easy; other contributors to Chicago printing, not so much.
     "They're hidden," she said. "I wanted to think about what you can't see. I'm obsessed by what I call 'invisible labor.'"

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Artificial intelligence is still pretty stupid.

Not a Christmas tree.

     I pay Apple some set sum — I think it's $14.95 a month, though it might be part of my phone plan — for access to something called "Apple Music." It's a fairly intuitive, comprehensive selection of more music than I could listen to in a thousand lifetimes, if a rip-off for artists who instead of getting a dollar when I buy their 45 now get .00001 of a penny when I listen to their song. If that.     

     Still, I listen to music a lot, particularly when exercising, or walking the dog, or doing chores, like folding laundry. I usually play my own "Library," of self-selected songs, though recently I discovered a feature called "Neil Steinberg's Radio" that plays songs which ... well, I'm not exactly sure what the curation procedure is. Some are often-played favorites. Others songs I've never heard from groups I'm unfamiliar with.
     What I've noticed is how really bad it is. How often it repeats songs I declined to listen to an hour ago. How many times it has served up "27 Jennifers." The thing has all of recorded music to choose from and ends up serving up a half-appealing mash, supposedly based on my own tastes. 
     And I take comfort in that. If AI can't pick songs that are halfway intriguing, it probably isn't near able to take over the world. Or maybe that's part of the plan. AI is being honed every day, and I assume, once it gets its algorithm together, it will cause all sorts of havoc in our lives — whether being monitored and influenced by the totalitarians even now tightening their grip around the throat of the body politic.
     Until then, I happily note each AI stumble and blunder. Maybe that's my way of blinding myself to he growing peril. Still, you can't help but be more impressed by its failures than its successes. So yes, when I asked iPhoto to serve up photos of a "Christmas tree" to illustrate the blog yesterday, most pictures were evergreens trimmed with tinsel and ornaments. But also my wife and boys wearing pointed birthday hats. And a house with a conical turret. And a Nick Cave sock monkey suit, above and Félix González-Torres' "Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)" at the Art institute of Chicago below. One of the rare artworks in a major museum that you can not only touch, but take a bit of. Visitors are encouraged remove a candy, and the pile is replenished regularly, kept at 175 pounds, the weight of the man being honored, who died of AIDS in the early 1990s.
      I know that. AI thinks it's a Christmas tree. Hardly seems a fair fight. So far.

Also not a Christmas tree.

Not every Christmas memory involves Marshall Field's windows.

 

     Merry Christmas! I hope you're having a memorable one. Of course I'm working. And honestly, some of my most memorable Christmases have been thanks to Xmas duty at the Chicago Sun-Times.
     There was the Christmas Eve I spent in the back seat of a Chicago police cruiser — observing, not arrested, shadowing a pair of rookies as they tried to keep the night silent in Englewood. The memory of that night always makes me wish the CPD still trusted its officers enough to let the media watch them in action.
     Pulling a story out of the stillness of Christmas Day is always a challenge — one Christmas I made the rounds of Thai and Chinese restaurants, talking to diners — not only Jews, but Muslims, too. Though the really memorable moment came afterward; a rabbi phoned me, outraged, because I quoted someone saying that Chinese food on Christmas is "a Jewish tradition." This, the rabbi fumed, is an insult to Jewish tradition. By the time we were done talking, well, let's say meetings and apologies were involved.
     Otherwise, Chicago history offers up several noteworthy Christmases. These are from my latest book, "Every Goddamn Day," which the paper is giving away in a drawing to five readers who subscribe or donate here through Dec. 31 at midnight.
     There is 1904, when the city of Chicago was broke and the treasurer went to La Salle Street and secured personal loans to make the city's payroll on Christmas Eve. There was the "boisterous crowd" gathered in 1955 in front of the Oak Park home of Dorothy Martin, who had announced the world would end on Christmas while spacemen arrived to usher herself and her followers to heaven. Or 1973, when a 350-pound slab of marble fell off the newly constructed Standard Oil Building, the overture in an engineering disaster that would end with the entire stone skin of the 82-story tower being replaced, at an expense greater than the original cost of construction.
     And my favorite: Christmas 1945. For the three Christmases before that year, 12 million Americans in uniform had dreamed of one thing — to be home, instead of at whatever rocky Pacific atoll, British bomber base, Alaskan radar station or German POW camp they happened to find themselves.
     The trains were utterly full — the Southern Railroad estimated 94% of passengers were service men and women. Six Marines grabbed a cab in San Diego and hired the driver to take them to New York City. Illinois servicemen who borrowed a furniture van in Denver spent Christmas snowbound in Kansas City.
     As a major rail hub, Chicago hosted an occupying army of stranded servicemen — over 100,000.

     Those who can’t go home, call. Bell Telephone reported all of its long-distance operators were on duty, a first. In part, because the pricey calls were being given away — 1,000 wounded vets recovering at Great Lakes Naval Hospital each get a five-minute call home, paid for by the Phone Home Fund, financed by readers of the Chicago Times, a predecessor of this newspaper.

     Compounding the chaos, Chicago, like much of the Midwest, was glazed by ice, the worst since records have been kept. A Navy plane carrying nine sailors landed at Municipal Airport (now Midway) but couldn’t take off. Dale Drew and June Kemper, two ticket agents for Consolidated Airlines, saw the Pacific vets moping around the airport in the morning. The agents phoned their mothers, already preparing family Christmas dinners for 11 and eight, respectively. What’s a few more? They divvied up the swabbies, each taking some home, where presents for all nine of them materialized under the trees.

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Might as well make merry

     The holiday cookies are at the front of the store as you walk in — they know their business at Sunset Foods — and I was pausing to admire them when a burst of plaid entered my field of vision. Ron Bernardi, whose four uncles, the Cortesi brothers, started Sunset in 1937. Or, more accurately, a red plaid tuxedo jacket with Ron Bernardi inside. He was joyous. 

    "Get the shoes," he ordered, when I took a photo close in, concentrating on the jacket, and I stepped back to capture the full effect.
     Ron is 81, and has worked at Sunset longer than I have been alive. I can't recount our conversation Monday except that he had me feel the velvet of his lapels. I wished him Merry Christmas and he wished me Happy Holidays as other shoppers — the parking lot was full — nudged me aside to claim their Ron time.
     I've heard people say that this holiday is muted, between our nation electing a moron as its  president, again, and ... well, that's about it, isn't it? But honestly, I don't feel downcast. Myself, I find the holidays highly welcome. Might as well be festive; we'll have reason aplenty to be glum in February. 

The plaid jacket had these sunglasses 
in the pocket when Ron got them, no 
doubt to shield the original owner from 
the harsh Vegas sun.

    

     Maybe it helps that Hanukkah begins on Christmas Day, one of those rare congruences when the two holidays line up. We're partying at the same time this year. Otherwise Hanukkah ranges over the calendar, starting as early as Nov 28, or as late as Dec. 27 (in 2013, Hanukkah and Thanksgiving overlapped).  Since Jews, like Muslims, are old school, and set their holidays based on a lunar calendar. 

     We aren't holding our family party until toward the end of Hanukkah's 8-day span (it runs until Jan. 2). But we have to fit everyone's ever-more-complex schedules. Twos boys, both married in the past year, two new brides, flitting around the globe like luna moths.
     "Thirty people," my wife said, looking around the kitchen with a flash of desperation.

     Nothing fancy. Beer, brats, latkes — since EGD has so many new readers, and Jews have slipped a bit from their position as America's Official Also-Ran Faith, I should probably explain that a latke is a potato pancake fried in oil. 

     Hanukkah being close to Christmas might increase the usual confusion of what the holiday is actually about,  and sometimes non-Jews query me: "Hanukkah is sort of your Christmas, yes?"

     No, it's not. It's more like V-E Day. Hanukkah celebrates a military victory — the rededication of the temple in Jerusalem after the surprise triumph of Judah and his Maccabees over the occupying Greek-Syrian army in 200 BC. (I could expand upon this fact to make several salient points about more current events. But it's Christmas so let's keep it light. My guess is that crowing about military victories won't be quite so enthusiastic this year).

     Previously, I've compared Hanukkah to Arbor Day, grown massive by its proximity to Christmas, like those ants exposed to radiation in a 1950s horror flick. I hobbyhorsed the Arbor Day metaphor at length in one of the first columns I wrote for an online platform — actually, one of the first columns anybody wrote for an online platform, as this was in 1996 for American Online. It was a surprise feature, an Easter egg — back then,  you would click on the AOL logo and get a cartoon, or an essay. The editor was John Scalzi, who went on to considerable wealth and fame as a science fiction writer (I recommend his Collapsing Empire trilogy; much fun).

    We spin dreidels — sigh, four-sided tops used in ancient gambling — sing Hanukkah songs which really lag behind Christmas carols. It seems unfair that Jews gave the world "White Christmas" and "Frosty the Snowman" and "Jingle Bell Rock" and half the songs on the radio this time of year, but when it comes to honoring our own holiday it's "I Have a Little Dreidel" which is really like fingernails on a chalkboard, and "Rock of Ages." What cannot be avoided must be endured.

     The moment I really like is lighting the menorahs in the window. Usually Jewish holidays are interior — around the table — or closed away in a synagogue, such as on Yom Kippur. The lighting candles on Hanukkah is really the one moment when the religion really confronts the outside world, lighting our candles against the darkness and saying, "Hey, Jews on your block. Get over it." 

     Well...I think that'll do. It's Christmas after all, nearly. And Hanukkah, almost.

GroceryLand ready for 'wild ride to come' — 'We're here to fight back'

Lori Cannon, center, Jose Jimenez, right. 

     You can't buy shampoo, toothpaste or toilet paper with food stamps. An echo of tightfisted Dickensian notions of charity, making sure the shiftless poor won't be living it up on their dime, washing their hair and brushing their teeth and similar displays of wild extravagance.
     "I don't consider toilet paper a luxury, I consider it a necessity," said Lori Cannon, when I visited her Saturday afternoon at GroceryLand, 5543 N. Broadway, the Edgewater food pantry for people living with HIV and, between us , for anyone else in need who stops by. "What we need are personal care items because people on food stamps aren't allowed to use them for anything but food."
     Cannon prefers donations of goods rather than money, given the very public disintegration of the umbrella organization that used to shelter GroceryLand. "This has been a very stressful year," she said, thanks to "the utter and complete collapse of the Heartland Alliance."
     Heartland Alliance was a major provider of social services in Chicago and considered itself among the oldest social welfare organizations in the country, tracing its roots to Jane Addams.
     Cannon, joined by local AIDS activists Greg Harris, Tom Tunney and James Cappleman, created OpenHand Chicago in 1988 to feed those in the LGBTQ community affected by HIV/AIDS.
     "We had one thing in common," Cannon told the Sun-Times in 2019. "Everyone we knew was either dead, dying or struggling to help someone who was heading there. We were tired. We were scared. We were angry. And we needed to do something other than sew AIDS quilt panels.”
      When I first reported on Cannon's efforts 30 years ago, the idea was to give AIDS patients independence by allowing them to select and prepare their own food themselves, rather than being forced to eat whatever meal was delivered that day.
     Then she was serving 40 people a week. Now it's 400.
     A flamboyant woman with magenta hair, Cannon tries to make GroceryLand as colorful and festive as she is.
     "What we try to do is create a space that doesn't look like a doctor's waiting room or a government office," she said.
     In 2011, OpenHand was renamed Vital Bridges and came under the umbrella of Heartland Alliance Health — a vital distinction, since HAH was spun off and survived when Heartland Alliance collapsed, kicking its staff to the curb.
     Cannon credits her core of volunteers and donors for getting them through.
     "The LGBTQ community is very familiar to being in a place of struggle," she said. "We live another day to fight, and I'm very happy to lead the charge."
     Does Cannon, 74, ever think about retiring?

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No wrapping paper for YOU!

     The wife and I popped into Target for some last minute essentials, including scotch tape and wrapping paper. The store had lots and lots of wrapping paper, and we hurried down aisles lined with red boxes crammed with the stuff at the way reasonable price of $3 a roll. Neither of us had to tell the other what we were looking for, and not finding.

     "Maybe the penguins are supposed to be Jewish," I ventured.

    Not that the wrapping paper was heavily Christian. "Joy" surrounded by a pine wreath. A shark in a Santa hat. It wasn't like they were Three Wise Men Adoring the Christ Child at the Manger paper. But still harkening back to a holiday other than the one we were celebrating. 
     My wife said perhaps they had Hanukkah paper earlier in the season but were cleaned out. But Hanukkah begins on Christmas Day this year, and there would be no reason that Jews would clean out Target while the store groans under Christmas paper five days before Christmas. Hoarding against changes in society? I doubted that. My thought was that we just didn't clear the bar anymore, as a body of customers. They don't sell wrapping paper aimed at the Shakers either.
     "Jews are only 1 percent of the population," I said.

     Or maybe Target's wrapping paper buyer is a 28-year-0ld who went to Oberlin College, who struck us off the list to light a candle for Gaza.
     Gauging one's status in society from the holiday wrapping paper sold at Target is either invalid or inspired. It's probably a better gauge, not of them, but of us. Of unease. Between Israel's reaction to Oct. 7 becoming the oxygen-laden whirlwind that stoked every spark of anti-Semitism into a brush fire, and that person who glided back to the presidency on thick ooze of bigotry, there are reasons aplenty to be uneasy.  The Jews aren't in the crosshairs, yet. But prejudice is practical — it oppresses whomever it can get away with oppressing.

     Liberals get slammed for being inclusive — we kept accepting trans people, it freaked out a chunk of the traditional Democratic base, and they voted for a liar, bully, fraud and traitor instead. There is sense lurking there. In 2016, British people were so worried a Turk would move next door that they left the European Union, shitcaning their whole economic system. Half the country is stretching to include everybody in one big happy family — well, not Jews, of course, thank you Gaza. We don't get a booth on the quad on Oppressed Peoples Day. And the other half is scanning the horizon, looking for someone to beat up. Not Jews, yet. But our number does have a way of coming up.

      On Friday, Elon Musk, dissatisfied with being the shadow president elect in this country, entered German politics as well.

      "Only the AfD can save Germany," Musk wrote to his 200 million plus followers on X. AfD is The Alternative for Germany, the racist, far-right party. Or, if you're in a rush, Nazis. I haven't deleted my account, yet, but I haven't posted there in weeks. I went on and unfriended Musk. Striking a blow for equality. So now he has 208,299,999 followers. Progress.

     Target did offer a quite attractive snowflake pattern wrapping paper, in wintery aqua rather than Christmassy red, and as that wasn't tied in with the celebration of a faith not our own, we bought some.

      For me, it isn't so much fear — I really don't think I'll be strolling down Michigan Avenue this spring, admiring the clouds, when a bunch of grinning jackbooted Red Hats will surround me and pluck out my beard, or force me to scrub the street with a toothbrush. Though the prospect comes to mind easily enough. It happened before.