1975 + 50

     To welcome 1975, my mother threw a party. At our home on Carteret Court in Berea, Ohio. Exactly 50 years later, I remember only a few things about the event. My Aunt Diane's tunnel of fudge cake, a chocolate bundt cake with a gooey center, the latest thing at the time. I made a sign on construction paper to hang at the doorway to our TV room, which we called "the play room." It showed a Maurice Sendakish monster with curled ram's horns stepping tentatively off a cliff. "WATCH YOUR STEP!" it said. I remember the sign well, because it was up for the next dozen years, until my parents sold the house and moved to Colorado.

    The next half century was the arc of my adult life. High school. College. The struggles of a first job, establishing myself, getting married, having children. Now that I'm in the waning years, it seems odd to think of something that happened 30, 40, now 50 years ago.  While the past is there — between my ears, mostly, not in the living world — it is best not to dwell too much upon it, to try to stay in the moment, now, and the future, such as it is. 
    So happy 2025! Did you have a fun New Year's Eve? We did. Usually we stay home, make little hot dogs wrapped in dough, watch television. But that gets dreary — New Year's Eve television is notoriously bad, with low end of the totem pole hosts trotted out to guffaw and time fill. We stand up for the Times Square countdown, chanting along — "Five, four, three, two, one, HAPPY NEW YEAR!" We kiss. We go to bed. Another year in the bag.
     This year, we joined friends in the city, went to a comedy show at Zanies.  The headliner was a handsome young man from the cast of Saturday Night Live, Michael Longfellow. He had a gentle, easygoing manner, and I enjoyed his routine well enough. For the first time, I heard a comedian and thought of the gap between his lived experience, at 30, and mine, at 64. Then a late tapas dinner at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba on North Halsted Street, an excellent choice, in that they served their regular menu, and the food was tasty. As a nod to New Year's, they passed out party hats and champagne, and that was fun too. 

     Quite surprising in fact — New Year's Eve, like Valentine's Day, is typically amateur night in restaurants. Half the options at double the price. Crowded. I don't think we'd gone to a restaurant on New Year's in the 21st century before last night, but Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba makes me wonder if we were being too timid. The service was good too. We tipped 30 percent.
     2025 is a nice round number. A quarter century since the year 2000, when we so worried about society shutting down because of a computer glitch — programmers in the 1970s hadn't thought that fourth digit would have to roll over, from 1 to 2 as 1999 became 2000. Systems would fail. Power grids collapse.
     Nothing bad happened except we all had to work. At a quarter to midnight, I looked out over the busy, brightly-lit, crowded Sun-Times newsroom at 401 N. Wabash, and thought, "I'm not ushering in the millennium in this fucking place," and walked outside, to the middle of the Wabash Avenue Bridge, and watched the clock on the Wrigley Building slowly advance toward midnight, when a wan generalized cheer went up from all around and fireworks popped in the distance. It was a nice, if solitary way to usher in the new year, century, millennium. 
     There we are, back in the past. It's very easy to do, to slide into that ditch. The present New Year's, not a font of fascination. We'll all at the top of that first roller coaster hill, waiting for the plunge, and to see if there will be track veering away from the bottom, or just a crater.
     Maybe the past is a trap we set for ourselves. The napkin at the top of the post, for instance. I didn't pull that off the internet. I found it this way: by walking to the black four-drawer Hon filing cabinet in my office closet. Pulling open the second drawer. Scanning the manilla folders to the Ns. Finding one labeled "1975 Napkins," just where I knew it would be. At first I thought the plural was inappropriate. But then I lifted up the napkin and discovered there were indeed two.

     Should I be proud of accessing that napkin so quickly, so immediately? For knowing it was there? Or ashamed? I'll go with proud. Be who you are — one of my usual resolutions — while all the time trying to stamp down the little fires of who you certainly are but really don't want to be anymore that flare up now and then.
     What possessed me, at 14, to tuck these napkins away? As keepsakes. Remembrances of the adult party I was allowed to attend. Not sent to bed, the way I'd be during bridge games, listening to Dr. Gitlin laughing from the living room. It didn't work — I don't remember anything besides the bundt cake and the sign. I don't think I drank — the last dry New Year's for 30 years, until I entered the time of my life where they were all dry, like every day of the year. I accepted my champagne at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba, held it high at midnight, clinked it all around, then set the glass down, unsipped.

     Now that I've photographed the napkin, and written about it, the thing to do would be to throw it away. I have too much of this stuff. Files and boxes, shelves and drawers.  Two tall Hon filling cabinets, two short ones.

     Of course I didn't do that. I carefully placed both napkins back in their folder, and returned them to the filing cabinet. Old habits die hard. Perhaps in the new year I can work at learning how to better shed these talismans of the past. Save my kids from the burden. I am nothing if not a work in progress. Trying to be, anyway. 

     
     
     

"You don't need a weatherman..."

     Half the fun of travelling is what you do to pad the spaces around the reason for your visit.
     For instance, last month we drove to central New York to spend Thanksgiving with our younger son's in-laws.     

     It's a two-day drive — we stretched it to three, spending nights in Cleveland and Buffalo.
     We arrived in Cooperstown Tuesday evening. Wednesday morning was a no-brainer: the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, which is well worth visiting — so much so that I have a big write-up about the place scheduled to run in the paper this Sunday.
     We spent the morning and the early afternoon there. But what of the late afternoon? My wife, who has a marvelous facility for sniffing out such places, suggested the Fenimore Art Museum, located in the former mansion of author James Fenimore Cooper. Who did not live in Cooperstown coincidentally — turns out his father, William, a Quaker leader, founded the village in 1768.

      The museum has an unusual Georgia O'Keeffe — "Brown and Tan Leaves," a 1928 autumnal still life — and an adequate John Singer Sargent. But what really sets it apart is its collection of American folk art. I particularly enjoyed the weather vane collection. Beautiful, rural, they made me wonder what exactly weather vanes  are good for besides being pretty. Yes, to tell which way the wind is blowing. But how is that useful to a farmer? In predicting the weather, mostly — for instance, in a certain location, an easterly wind might mean an increased chance of rain, while westerly was more an indication of fair weather ahead.

    To understand just how important the wind was to weather prediction, all we have to do is turn to etymology. The word "weather" is easily a thousand years old, from the Old English weder, meaning "air and sky." Or, going back further, to the Indo-Germanic weh, meaning "blow." To get a sense of how words formed. Say it out loud and create a little breeze yourself — "weather"and "wind" have the same root.

    Moving on, Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary traces "vane" to the Dutch vaan, flag or banner, while its homophone "vain" is from the Latin, vanus meaning empty or insubstantial. To round out the homophone hat trick, "vein" is from the Latin venio, or pass through a conduit; a reminder that even though words sound the same they can trace their origins to different places.

     Not that the definitions don't blend at times. One of Webster's definitions of "vain" is "inconstant," and a weather vane is certainly that, leading to a slur for unreliable people, such as in the 1623 folio of "Love's Labor Lost."    

    "What plume of feathers is hee that indited this Letter?" the Queen asks. "What veine? What wethercocke?"

    Of course "inconstant" is so judgy. I prefer to think of it as "flexible."     

"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.