"Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" — The State of the Blog, 2024

     Exactly one year ago, EGD's State of the Blog 2023 was headlined, "Trump strangles puppy, popularity soars." Our dean of commentators, Grizz, ended his remarks with: "Right now, I'm looking forward to making it to 2025. Yes, you read that right. A year from now, the suspense will be over, and we will know whether we've survived a narrow escape...or if we're toast."
     Be careful what you wish for. Though I suppose his assumption was we would not be toast. And we are not quite, yet, burnt beyond hope. A little scraping — okay, a lot of scraping — could someday set it right. 
      But not yet. We are still in the browning phase. We are indeed, for want of a better term, toast. Or if you prefer, still emitting our usual frog croaks, to move onto a new metaphor, bobbing on the surface of a pot of water on the stove, enjoying the growing warmth, occasionally casting uneasy glances down at the blue flames, going full bore against the bottom of the pot. Getting hot down there.
     So how did 2024 go, blogwise? What's the joke? "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?" The numbers are up. Way up. But they're bots. Historically, a bit more than half the hits come from the United States. The past year it was 18 percent, with two-thirds occurring in China and Hong Kong. I posed the question to Google, and Artificial Intelligence served up this among the possibilities: "China is often associated with high volumes of automated bot activity, which may be scanning your site for potential security weaknesses."
     Scanning for weaknesses? Are they not obvious? The whole blog is one big weakness. An ad hoc array of words set down on by a solitary, aging newspaperman on a creaky platform. Can it be that tough to crack? I'd think a sharp Chinese hacker could get inside in a heartbeat, without knocking on the door hundreds of thousands of times. Though toward what end I can't imagine. No money here. Still, somebody is trying something, so if EGD suddenly vanishes one day, assume that the Chinese finally jimmied the lock, ran in and shut off all the lights, rather than I finally went mad and deleted the thing. Though that is always a possibility.

     For now, it's here. And how did the year go? Honestly, thinking back toward calendar 2024, no highlight initially came to mind. Not one. Forgetfulness or self-effacement? You choose! But let me paw over the listings and see what we can find.
    In January, we began the month and year attending a legal clinic for immigrants at the courthouse, with "Legal community steps up for migrants" certainly putting a finger on what would be the big issue of 2024 and, no doubt, into next year and beyond.
     In February, we said goodbye to another friend and colleague, "Jack Higgins drew from the heart of Chicago." 

     In March, a blog post I had hoped to be a column in the newspaper, but didn't pass the 501(c)3 test, "Drink poison or eat Chex? The choice is yours." It is a restriction I would chafe against all year, leading to what I considered Timidity Creep: from not endorsing a candidate to not saying anything strong about anyone. 

     In April I wrote two columns worth recalling — one about a woman who bought the first Ford Mustang ever sold in the United States, 60 years ago, and still has it. The story has been told before, but I'm proud to have realized it isn't about the car; it's about the woman. The piece became among of our best read articles of the year. A week later, I published one of those deep dives that are so much fun to write, about the trumpet. If you read only one story cited here, read that one. A long piece needs a narrative arc, and this one seemed obvious: start with Esteban Batalan, lead trumpet of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, playing at Orchestra Hall, snake through the Conn Selmer factory in Indiana, and end up at a high school on the South Side. 

     But narrative arc shouldn't trump humanity, and while I was crushing these two Morgan Park students I'd met to fit into the final paragraph of my enormous trumpet saga, I realized that by. turning them into a literary device I was short-changing their story. So I ran them as a second, separate column, even though it sheered the neat ending off my trumpet magnus opus. I'm proud of that decision.    

     In May, I held my breath and verrrrrry carefully picked my way through the Gaza protests, with "Student protesters hold their breath, turn blue," trying my gosh-darned best not to step on the tails of a single kitty sleeping in the hallways of Navy Pier.

    In June, after years and years of trying to get the Chicago Police Department to let me follow a cop who'd been shot in rehab, I shrugged and wrote a column about a CPD officer who quit the force and moved to the suburbs. Working with the Northbrook police reminded me of everything the Chicago cops could be and aren't. 

    In July, I was able to write candidly to Joe Biden's debate disaster in a way that I didn't even bother trying to get into the newspaper. 

    In August I used the commotion of the convention to spend a few hours with Brandon Johnson, lightly gumming him, thinking that maybe doing so would mean there would be a second. But I might as well have chomped, because there wasn't and probably won't be. The man's a train wreck on a scale seldom seen outside of Roadrunner cartoons. I also managed to sneak my older son's wedding into the paper. My younger son got married four months later without any requests for media coverage, to my relief, as I didn't see how I could pull off that backflip a second time.

    In September we comforted the White Sox — okay, laughed at them — after their historically awful season.  In October, we looked how far women had come on the 50th anniversary of a law allowing them to get credit cards in their own name. And how much they had to lose in the upcoming election. 

    In November, EGD gazed through latticed fingers at the infamy of a second Trump administration, and what erosions to our Republic we can expect. In December I invited readers to share a cab with me while the driver tried to rip me off with "How much do you tip the guy who tries to rob you."

     There you have it: I'm glad I bothered to check, as the year turns out to be not as meh as I initially remembered. To those of you who are not Chinese spambots, thank you, as always, for reading my stuff. Thank you to all the commenters — and their numbers are swelling, I believe, because I invite comment in the morning letter sending out my blog link (if you would like to receive it, email me at dailysteinberg@gmail.com). Thank you Marc Schulman, of Eli's Cheesecake, for being this blog's advertiser for the 12th year in a row. If you haven't ordered your cheesecake, well, get to it. 

     As grim as the prospects for the upcoming year certainly are, I do not find myself feeling downhearted. I share Grizz's 2023 sense of anticipation. Two personal landmarks on the horizon that I'm fairly certain have a good chance of happening, neither of which I would dream of jinxing by specifying. You'll find out if and when they occur. 

     As for the country, well, having marked time through years of historical slough, we who love democracy find ourselves in a situation where we are called upon to fight for everything good about this country, against, if not the forces of evil, then its henchmen and lackeys, handmaidens and toadies. They might straddle the country in 2025, but they will not win for the simple reason they can't win. If they're winning, then the story isn't over yet. Not to suggest the fight is either easy or certain. Times will be awful and terrifying, and could go on for years, maybe decades. But really, can you think of a better purpose than to try to save the United States of America from those who would cavalierly betray everything she represents and destroy her? I can't. So let's get to it.

Always a pleasure to work with our head of photography, Ashlee Rezin.

Ghost bird

     Neither of us heard the crash. It must have happened when nobody was in the kitchen.

     But one day, weeks if not months ago, I noticed this ghostly imprint of a bird on our window. It doesn't photograph well. But it was like a snapshot — raised wings, neck, head, beak, body. No mistaking it. A bird.

      And here is the odd part.

     Having seen it, registered it, repeatedly, over a span of time, I then did ... nothing. There seemed nothing to do. I went about my business, making coffee, washing dishes, warming dinner. All the stuff one does in the kitchen.

    Now and then, I'd see the outline, and eventually a thought came to me:

    "I ought to wash that off."

    And even then the thought was held in suspended animation, not acted upon, and another period of days or weeks went by, which is odd, because I like to keep that window clean, because it is the window through which I watch the birdfeeder, and its constant menagerie of little brown birds and cardinals, doves and woodpeckers, swallows, wrens. Even the occasional hawk, though they feed, not at the feeder, but on the squirrels under it. 

     Then one day I decided it was time to do away with the ghost bird. I grabbed a bottle of Windex and a rag, exited the kitchen door with purpose, and walked around the sofa and coffee table and two chairs, to stand before the window, in order to spritz it with the blue liquid and wipe it clean.

      The human mind is a funny thing. How many times are you home, because it's 4th of July or Christmas or whatever, and you think, "I wonder if the mail is here?" and you pop your upper body out the front door and have your hand on the mailbox handle when you think, "Duh. A federal holiday. No mail."

     So it was only standing there, with Windex in one hand, and a rag in the other, ready to wipe away the ghost bird, that I angled my gaze down, to below the window, and ...

    The funny thing is, I was surprised. Taken aback. As if there hadn't been weeks if not months of foreshadowing.

     No need to go into the gory details. A dove of some sort. I went to get a shovel to transfer it to the wooded patch along our property. The ghost bird is still there. 

"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.