The Chicago Cultural Center

 

    "I've never been in there," said my friend, as we walked past the Chicago Cultural Center Friday after breakfast at Taco Lulu on Adams Street.
     "Let's fix that," I said, steering us inside. "Biggest Tiffany dome in the world."
     A completely understandable lapse. Originally the main branch of the Chicago Public Library, the Cultural Center, at Randolph and Michigan, has always struggled to find a purpose — generally home to sincere temporary displays of artwork by young persons, it comes off as a gorgeous box with nothing inside. Maybe because nothing on display is anywhere near as finely wrought as the building itself. Currently it has puppets related to the International Puppetry Festival, going on now. Some quite nice. But still lumps of paper mache set next to to shimmering glass and tile. 

     Of course I told her the story of Richard J. Daley's wife, Sis, saving the building in 1972, saying, in essence, "The hell you will," after her husband had announced it would be torn down.

     I routinely pass through only because I walk around the Loop a lot, the Cultural Center is a full city block, north to south, and you can cut through and keep warm on cold days.     
     If breakfast at a taco place seems odd, the plan had been to meet at Lou Mitchell's on Jackson. But the restaurant is closed for vacation until Jan. 22 — their right, of course, but they don't mention it on the web site. I love Lou Mitchell's — it's 100 years old, great food, thick raisin toast — but c'mon. It's also closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and I tend to forget that odd Tuesday closing. I think I've been turned away from Lou Mitchell's more than I've managed to eat there. 

The circle with a Y inside it is called "The Municipal Device" and represented the city — the Y 
representing the branching river. The CPL is for Chicago Public Library.

The legacy of Martin Luther King in Chicago: "to fight on, against all odds''

 

Shermann Dilla Thomas

     Martin Luther King Jr. was a Chicagoan. He lived at 1550 S. Hamlin with his wife and their four children. Coretta Scott King remembered the apartment building as "dingy ... no lights in the hall, one dim bulb at the head of the stairs," with a hallway reeking of urine.

      They moved in Jan. 26, 1966, and lived there, off and on, for about a year. Long enough to count — though I suppose that depends on who's doing the counting and how expert that person is at the advanced Chicago art of welcoming in the people they think belong, and keeping out those who, in their estimation, don't.
     With King's time here in mind and his holiday uncomfortably sharing Monday with the second inauguration of Donald Trump, I visited his old stomping ground by hitching a ride on a King-focused private bus tour that TikTok historian Shermann Dilla Thomas conducted for United Way of Metro Chicago.
     If there's one thing that sets Thomas's tours apart — alongside his deep knowledge and warm personality — is that the past never stays past. Right off the bat, he drew a line from King's time to our own.
     "Today we're here to talk about Dr. King's time in Chicago," Thomas began. "The thing that brings him to Chicago is housing. It's crazy to think that almost 60 years later we're still dealing with housing issues related to segregation, inadequate housing for the poor, lack of public housing, absentee landlords, people who hold onto vacant lots and dilapidated properties and don't do anything about them."
     The tour stopped at the Stone Temple Baptist Church, a former Romanian synagogue on West Douglas Boulevard.
     "This is where King did a ton of time doing his Chicago Freedom campaign," said Thomas. "Every year the folks connected with Skokie's Holocaust Museum build sukkahs in North Lawndale to continue the tradition. That's how you build community."
     The best and worst of the city freely mix — Thomas pointed out the beelove cafe, a sparkling facility featuring local honey, directly across the street from the Chicago Police Department's notorious "Black Site."
     "Thousands of Black and brown kids have been taken in that building without due process and held for days being tortured," Thomas said.
     Next stop, the old Sears Homan Square campus.

     "This was an anchoring space," Thomas said. "What makes them leave? King's assassination. ... Dr. King was the powderkeg. King gets assassinated, there were riots here, and Sears decides too take this expansive campus and put it all in one building, the Sears Tower

To continue reading, click here.







."

"Soup is too important"

The photo I need is the finished soup, hot and ready and in the bowl, heaped with chicken 
and carrots. But every time that was before me, I forget myself and began spooning it into my maw.

   
     Can you be offended by a grocery list? I can, though immediately realized that the ability to do so is not a good thing. But rather, a bad thing, an occasion for self-improvement. So let's begin, and own the sin.
     Last weekend, my wife was slammed by whatever virus is going around — not COVID, she took the test. But enough to confine her to bed, wiped out. I busied myself making tea and urging toast, unsuccessfully. She came down with whatever it was on Friday, slept all day Saturday.  But by Sunday had recovered enough to start issuing instructions. I had to go to the store to get essentials and "food for the week." She texted me a list. Kleenex, since she was burning through the last box. Skim milk. And then the item that raised my dandor: "Chicken noodle soup (low salt if possible)."
     Chicken noodle soup? Canned chicken noodle soup? What kind of person does she think I am? Is that what we're reduced to? Are we animals?
     The first thing she had done when she took ill was dig her homemade chicken soup out of the freezer. I boiled noodles — that she trusted me with — and saw that she spooned it into herself. But there was only one container and that was soon gone, in the first hours of her illness. Now we were to follow it up, drive the sickness off with ... what? Progresso? Out of a can? A canned soup?
     "I'll make you soup," I announced.
     Suddenly the haze of suffering lifted and she looked at me, clear-eyed and lucid. Her hard expression was like a blurry image snapping into focus. No words were spoken, but it was as if she said: "Soup? You? You'll make me soup? Is that what you're saying? Really? What do you take me for, a fool?"

      That doubled my resolve. Soup. How hard could it be? You pour water in a big pot, right? You put in, ah, the soup ingredients. Chicken must be important here — can't make chicken soup without it, right? I know that. You boil it. The result is soup. 

     Off to Sunset Foods. I got baby carrots and onions and celery — I forgot the parsnip, but those turn out to be dispensable. Back home I dug some of the vast supplies of chicken out of the freezer in the basement.
     Suddenly, she was downstairs, in the kitchen. The virus held at bay. She helped the selection of a pot — you can't just use any pot, apparently. The right pot selected, she vetted the chicken pieces to go into the pot. Not that you can just put them in — which I was about to do. No, you rinse the frozen chicken first to defrost it a bit. Separate the pieces. I almost said, "Won't they separate when you start boiling the water?" But something told me not to question the master. Nobody interrupts a master cello class with, "Mr. Casals, don't you just pull the bow back and forth over the strings?"
     What I said was:
     "I can make soup."
     "No you can't," she shot back. "Soup is too important."
     I peeled the onion; she checked that I had indeed thoroughly removed the outer brown layer and hadn't half-assed it. Into the pot. She handed me a bag of baby carrots and I poured them in. Mistake.
     "Wait a second," she said, as the carrots tumbled into the pot. Were these not the baby carrots already in the fridge? No, the new ones I just bought. I'd left them sitting on the counter. To put into the soup. She scowled — we should have used the old carrots first. I looked into the pot, wondering if I should begin plucking the carrots out, one by one. She read my mind — 34 years of marriage — and said no, they had to remain now, as they had touched the raw chicken.
     "I thought they looked too bright," she muttered, unhappily. I made a mental note to eat the half bag of baby carrots in the fridge, with hummus. They were now somehow my responsibility.

     I was allowed to cut the celery, but as I did, I felt her eyes upon me, as if she was wondering, "Can he do this right?" The pieces passed muster. And I could put the pot under the tap and turn on the water.
     She hadn't instructed me to get fresh garlic, so the shameful strategum of powdered garlic would have to do. Then there was the matter of salt. She grabbed a big blue box of rough Kosher salt and poured some into an open palm, then dumped that into the pot.
     "How much salt?" I asked, trying to keep myself involved in the process. 

     "You saw, right?" she replied. "Not too much. Not too little. Just enough."
     For the record, late in the soup making, she would allow me to taste the soup I was supposedly making, and I would add more salt. My wife couldn't taste anything.
     The soup cooked. There were more steps. The flame was adjusted. I boiled a pot of extra wide Manischewitz egg noodles — they are kept apart from the soup, added before serving, to keep them intact and to cool the soup for eating.
      We ate the soup for supper. It wasn't quite her soup — not as rich. Maybe that missing parsnip. But it wasn't bad either — and we consumed bowl after bowl. Dinner plans for Monday night were scrapped because we realized we still had soup left, and two bowls are a meal. The rest we froze as insurance against future illness.
      Only after did I realize that my making the soup had not been the welcome act of a concerned husband trying to nurse his ill wife back to health, but a species of rudeness, prodding a sick woman to get up and make us soup. I would rush to reassure her that, of course it goes without saying that my soup wasn't 100 percent — it needed dark meat — but what she generously deemed, "perfectly fine soup." Honestly, I don't believe we'll ever speak of it  again. The soup, for want of a better term, that I attempted to make is in the freezer, and this near-soup will be consumed at some point, probably to ward off the cold of February. But soon after that I expect to find the freezer magically jammed with plastic containers of actual, properly-prepared soup, deep yellow broth, so we are never again caught short in a time of sickness and forced to take desperate measures.

Ed Kelly at 100: Living among old friends

 

     "This is what I'm going to be buried in, right here." says Ed Kelly, of the Marine Corps blanket on the sofa behind him. Kelly was a gunner on a Navy Helldiver during World War II.

     Ed Kelly answers the door of his home in Lincolnwood.
     "Let me show you a few things. Muhammad gave me this here," he says, pointing to a clenched bronze hand. "This is his fist. He gave me that years ago. I was like a father to him. The twins are my nieces. We were close. I've got pictures of him in the basement."
     That he does. Many pictures. Being close to Ali, the greatest athlete of the 20th century, is the sort of thing a man can take pride in. As are photographs with the powerful and famous. Kelly, 100, former Democratic Party slate-maker and czar of the Chicago Park District, in that order, has much to be proud of.
     Readers might recall we chatted for Kelly's 90th birthday, when he rewarded my interest by firmly planting a harpoon into the side of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
     "Rahm's not a Chicago guy," Kelly said then. "He'll never be a Chicago guy."
     Troublemaker that I am, my fondest hope for this visit is a reprise. I baited hooks with the two mayors since. Nary a nibble.
     Kelly's centennial was in August — he waved off media inquiries, then. But longtime press agent Bernie DiMeo persuaded him to open up.
     "This is Richard J., fishing with me." Kelly says, of a photo with the first Mayor Daley. "He called me. He said, 'Get a boat; let's go fishing.'"
     Not that the past is all hanging with mayors — tragedy will find even the most connected insider.
     "This is my grandson, killed in Texas," he said. "Three Niles motorcycle police officers were trying to raise money. This is my Joey."
     Sgt. Joseph Lazo, 39. His photo is everywhere — in frames, on pillows.
     "A drunk driver ..." Kelly says. "He was like a son to me. We raised him. I've been going to the grave for four and a half years, for Joey and my wife. I go every Monday."
     Marilyn Kelly, 94; 76 years of marriage.
     "I lose Joey, then two years later I lose my wife," he says.
     What's it like to be 100?
     "Hard to believe I've reached 100," Kelly says. "Everywhere I go, I have doctors and nurses asking, 'What did you do?' I can't say I've lived different. I'm not a food guy. I've never been a drinker. Never smoked."
     We go into the basement. The bar seats six. One hundred photos are framed on the wall if there is one, and we pause before many.
     "Here's Papa and with Janie," he says, pointing to a photo of Bears founder George Halas and Jane Byrne. "Here's Stevie Zucker. Here's Gale Sayers. Jesse White — I've known Jesse since he was 15 years old."
     I point out an impossibly young Paul Simon, the former senator.

To continue reading, click here.

Fox trot

 

     In the nearly 25 years I've lived in Northbrook, my yard has been visited by coyote and deer, hawks and owls, even a pair of puddle-paddling ducks, who took up residence in wet weather.
     But never a fox. I heard one once — rather, heard the screams of the rabbits I assumed were being slaughtered by a fox. And seen a few down the block over the years. But Sunday one showed up in the backyard, in broad daylight. Alas, none of the photos I snapped were as clear as the image he, or she, presented, strolling along First Avenue. Trees kept getting in the way.
     "Maybe he'll polish off some squirrels before he leaves," I said to the wife. We have been plagued by squirrels this winter, pushing the birds aside and shimmying into the feeder. The old defenses don't work. I think the things are learning.

     Back to foxes, which I had never really considered before. For a moment, I couldn't quite place where in the animal kingdom foxes belong. Are they relatives of dogs? Or maybe cats — they do have a certain, sleek, feline quality. 

     No, not with that snout. They must be doggish, a hunch the Encyclopedia Britannica quickly confirms in its "Dogs" entry: "All dogs belong to the family Canidae, along with their relatives — wolves, jackals, and foxes." Even then, they don't quite belong to that trio, do they? Foxes have a quality wolves and jackals lack — a sympathy, their famous cunning maybe. Wolves are hungry, coyotes mangy, foxes sly. Though physically, the Britannica sets foxes apart this way: "Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the fox family, as compared with wolves and coyotes, is the eyes. They are yellow with elliptical pupils. all other canids, including dogs, have round pupils." 

     Didn't get close enough to look into the fox's eyes, which is probably a good thing.

     Foxes are solitary creatures — they do not travel in packs, and are monogamous. The OED ends its definition with this curious line, "Preserved in England and elsewhere as a beast of the chase" as if being hunted were somehow elemental to the species. More likely it's elemental to a dwindling crumb of the British upper crust.

     Here is where I would normally plunge into the etymology of "fox." There certainly are enough slang usages, related to cleverness, of course, to drunkenness, to swords. The foxtrot dance is not named after the animal, but vaudevillian Harry Fox. 

     Though the only definition that really caught my interest, as a book lover, is "foxing" — the brown spots on the pages of old books. There is an unusual related definition in the OED: "slang. An artificial sore" citing an 1862 sentence: "Daring youths were constantly in the habit of making 'foxes' (artificial sores)." Which raises the question, "Why?" Plague envy? Though it's safe to blame fashion, with a fox being a variety of fake beauty mark. 

     Back in the 1970s, "foxy" was a term of appreciation for feminine beauty. Even though it was endorsed by as revered an arbitrator of cool as Jimi Hendrix, with his song "Foxy Lady," I seem to recall being of the opinion that actually using the word, sincerely, reflected poorly upon the speaker, tarring him as being out of it, maybe even ridiculous.. Or maybe it was just one of those things I could never imagine myself saying under any circumstance. In the "Wild and Crazy Guys" sketch that Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd played on "Saturday Night Live," the hilariously enthusiastic and clueless Festrunk Brothers have a particular affection for the word. "That fox bar was really something tonight!"  

    The fox poked around, then quickly vanished, a dynamic I will emulate today.

COVID, five years on: memories of a strange and scary time

     When did COVID start for you? Personally, I trace the beginning to Feb. 13, 2020. My wife and I were waiting for a plane at O'Hare when a group of Japan Airlines flight attendants walked past, wearing those masks I'd read about. I snapped a photo and sent it into the city desk. Look: news.
     Emotionally, it really began in March. The stripped Target shelves. A few hours before Gov. JB Pritzker shut down the restaurants, I popped into Kamehachi for a last sushi fix and was surprised to find myself the lone diner at 12:30 p.m. Watching the chef prepare my order, thinking, with dread: "I'm killing myself for a negi hamachi roll."    

      Though if you are looking for the very beginning in the Chicago area, I suppose that should be Jan. 13, 2020 — five years ago Monday — when a suburban woman returned from Wuhan, China, where she had been caring for her elderly father, bringing with her the COVID virus. A few days later she felt ill and went to Ascension St. Alexius Medical Center in Hoffman Estates. making her the first person in Illinois, the second in the United States, diagnosed with a disease that, in the next half decade, would kill more than 1 million Americans and 20 million worldwide.
     Anniversaries are complicated. Five years is not that long, but already COVID has gone hazy. A lot of people seem to have forgotten it ever occurred. Or have taken away a deep antipathy toward both medicine and measures to prevent infection — vaccines are poison, masks an unacceptable intrusion upon their personal liberty. That seems far from what the actual lessons should be. Perhaps a reconsideration is in order.
     But it can be hard to form clear judgments, because COVID was immediately politicized — a plot of foreigners, a blue state concern. As if a virus cares who you voted for. As severely as COVID rocked society, it was also just one bad element of a very bad year. Within a 10-month span, the world was shut down by a deadly plague then, two months later, American cities were rocked by riots after the murder of George Floyd. Then in January, the Capitol was stormed by rioters. Not exactly memories that folks want to dwell on.
     The crisis shifted when the vaccine became available in early 2021. Some wouldn't stick out their arm to get it. Me, I drove down to Springfield, expecting a mob scene at the Walgreen's, like the ending of the movie "The Year of Living Dangerously," with crowds climbing over each other and mothers waving their babies at frenzied med techs. Instead, the store was empty and silent. There weren't even shoppers. It was strange and a little frightening.
     Maybe that's why people so readily forget COVID; it was so odd, so scary. Who can look back fondly at hoarding toilet paper? Though I do take pride in my response. I didn't want to sit out the plague sheltering in Northbrook, and tried to find a role I could play. I've written lots of medical stories — heart transplants, lung transplants, autopsies, you name it, so figured I should explore the medical response. Photographer Ashlee Rezin and I began with a three-part series, looking at the harried nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital, then moved on to Roseland.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 1999: Devastation of home lights fire under couple

      So what happens once the fires are finally out? To the thousands and thousands of people whose homes were destroyed in the Los Angeles inferno, who now have to start their lives over? A task in many ways more daunting than fleeing the flames. To return and rebuild or, more likely, begin anew somewhere else.
     I was rooting around in what I've written about Los Angeles fires — this is the worst, but it's not the first. I found this from more than 25 years ago, looking at what one couple did after they were burned out of their home. Afterward, I'll give an update.

     What would you grab, rushing out of your house as it burned down?
     A classic dilemma that raises a tingle, rolling over in the mind. Imagine. You wake up, the place in flames, you can grab something. What is it?
     Myself, I settled that question years ago: pants.
     I decided this after covering a fire at the Drake Hotel.
     None of the guests was ever in danger — the fire was in an electrical vault under the sidewalk — but a few nevertheless decided to flee wearing their fluffy white Drake Hotel robes.      And nothing else.
     They were a sight, lounging in the small park north of the hotel, waiting to be allowed back in. After that I resolved that, unless I was myself aflame, I would take the five seconds to grab pants, which I keep conveniently crumpled on the floor, ready, in case of emergency. Pants; then kids; then wife; then, if time permits, cats, then out the door.
     A mild fright to think about. But Megan Edwards actually confronted the awful reality six years ago, when the Altadena fire storm burned 1,000 homes near Los Angeles, including hers.
     She had a few minutes to get out. She grabbed her red underwear and a keepsake Indian arrowhead. She didn't bother with anything else.
     That was odd enough. But then something really unusual happened. When she returned, with her husband Mark Sedenquist, to the charred rubble of their home (the only thing standing was a shower stall) she had a revelation. Amidst the ruins, Edwards decided: They wouldn't rebuild. They would buy a big motorhome and crisscross the country, which is what they have been doing for the last five years. She has written a book, "Roads from the Ashes," about the experience.
     Though Edwards is from the Chicago area — an Army brat, she was born in the hospital at Great Lakes Naval Base — she is obviously a Californian now. In her book, she is practically ecstatic as she sifts through the smoky remains of her home.
     "There's nothing here, nothing at all. We can do anything we want," she bubbles to her husband. "Anything. Do you know what that means? We can go anywhere, do anything, start over again. Whatever. I think we should think of this as an opportunity. I think it just could be the most amazing thing."
     "Shut up," her husband says — and I murmured a hearty "Amen."
     Still, I was interested in talking to her, to see if she could possibly have been that pleased about everything she owned going up in smoke.
     "I was in shock," she said, in the couple's motor home, parked in front of the Sun-Times. But not unhappy? What about family photos?
     "I'm not that big a photograph person," she said, displaying the impenetrability of the enlightened, a wall I was determined to breach.
     "What about your books?" I asked, surveying the spartan interior of the motor home. She is, after all, a writer. Here I came a little closer to cracking through her shell of chirpy California karma.
     "I do miss my books," she said, as if she meant it.
     Then there was the question of money. In the book, practical matters — which demand so much time and effort from us nonspiritual folk — have a way of ironing themselves out. Things just appear. For instance, after the fire, use of a guest house on a secluded estate in San Gabriel "materialized magically," and they lived there for five months. They have a slick Web site —www.roadtripamerica.com — but not one with advertisements. Who pays for everything?
     "We decided we would always do our own thing and the money would be there," said Edwards.
     "Most people have these fears; if you quit your job, what's the worst that can happen?" said her husband. "That can happen anyway. In half an hour, it can all disappear. It frees you up to be more risky."
     Very nice, but who's paying? The insurance company never settled on the house. They didn't have a big bankroll. Call it the practical Midwesterner in me, but I was curious. Edwards said they had investors.
     "What are they investing in?" I asked. "Where are their returns coming from?" She said they were investing in her writing, hoping to reap profits from some as-yet-uncertain enterprise down the road. A movie maybe.
     I eventually gave up. They don't miss their stuff, and the money comes from somewhere. I would have to take it on faith.
     Walking back to the material world, I glanced back at the mobile home.
     "What would YOU do if all your stuff went up in smoke?" is written on its side, in big letters. Despite its surface anti-materialism, there was something very late 1990s America going on here, the seizing of a moment of personal disaster and spooling it into a career, almost into a brand. The stuff might have burned up, but the moment was preserved forever in this bit of wandering performance art.
     It seemed a tough way to make a living: Sure, you see the nation. But I've never taken a vacation in my life where, two weeks into it, I wasn't itching to get home. "What would YOU do if all your stuff went up in smoke?" I'd cry like a baby.
       — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 29, 1999

Megan Edwards finally settled in Las Vegas, and has written four more books.