Flashback 2012: From Twinkies to yellow pencils, 175 years of Chicago firsts

    A job like mine is helped by advance planning. One year ago, Facebook fed this Chicago birthday piece to me. But I already had a post up for the day. Once upon a time I would have put it up as a second post of the day, to garner more hits. But that ship has sailed. Then I considered running it the next day. But nothing is sadder than a guest who arrives late to the party, and rather than do that, I thought I'd save for 364 days, until it was more apt. Patience is a virtue. 

      Happy birthday, Chicago! The city of broad shoulders became a city exactly 175 years ago Sunday. If the big day caught you by surprise, it shouldn’t have — it’s right there on the city seal, “INCORPORATED 4th MARCH 1837.” The first charter divided the city into six wards, with the mayor elected to a one-year term.

City seal in the mayor's office.

     Fate had smiled upon Chicago — the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 meant that the trade of the world came to the doorstep of what was up to then a sparsely populated frontier outpost, prompting a frenzy of land speculation, immigration, investment and unprecedented growth.

     The new City of Chicago immediately began smiling back at the world. Every catalog of Chicago’s gifts to humanity must begin with architecture, but not with the first steel-frame skyscraper (the Home Insurance Building, rising a dizzying 10 floors in 1885), nor the renowned Chicago School, nor the first parking garage with a ramp (built here in 1918), not even Frank Lloyd Wright and his Prairie style.
     Chicago’s first — and arguably most significant — contribution to the world’s dwellings came from Augustine Taylor, who arrived here in the 1830s and took the heavy-beamed construction used to build houses for centuries and substituted a way of constructing lighter structures that critics called “balloon-frame” buildings because, they complained, houses that light would blow away in the wind.* They didn’t. Today most homes built in America are balloon-frame construction.
     That was just one of many new business concepts that first sparked in Chicago. Retail by mail got its start in 1872 when Aaron Montgomery Ward sent a single sheet price list to 40 farmers belonging to the National Grange organization. A decade later, his catalog had 10,000 items. Chicago saw the first Pullman sleeping cars (1859) and full-service railroad dining car (1868). In 1868, printer William Rand formed a partnership with Irish immigrant Andrew McNally. They printed business directories and railroad guides, and by 1872 began to include maps in the guides. In 1904, Rand-McNally published the first automobile road map — not of Chicago, alas, but New York.

     Not all was business. While Philadelphia’s zoo was up and running by 1874, the Lincoln Park Zoo was founded first — in 1868, with the donation of a pair of mute swans. On Thanksgiving Day 1887, a popular American sport was invented in Chicago, when a baseball game was played at the Farragut Boat Club using an old boxing glove and a broomstick.
     Despite what Bears fans might believe, football was not invented in Chicago — though the modern fiberglass helmet was, patented in 1940 by John Riddell Sr., a former math teacher and football coach at Evanston High School.
     Without question the one Chicago event that had the biggest impact on history was the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Its influence can hardly be overstated. More than 20 million people visited Chicago, and the Ferris wheel was invented to thrill them. Zippers were first displayed there — invented by Chicagoan Whitcomb Judson — and the mechanical dishwasher, invented by an Illinois society matron tired of her servants breaking her china. A host of foods debuted that would become perennial household favorites: Cream of Wheat, Cracker Jack, Shredded Wheat, Juicy Fruit gum.
     At the fair, Pennsylvania caramel manufacturer Milton Hershey saw chocolate-making equipment that inspired him to try a new area of the candy business. The fair also led to timeless novels written by Chicagoans — The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser.
     Pencils are typically yellow because the Koh-I-Noor company made a splash at the exposition with its display of pencils with 14 coats of golden-yellow lacquer. After that, everybody wanted yellow pencils.
     In the 19th century, Chicago looked east for culture, but by the 20th it was making its own. Creative giants were born here — including Walt Disney — and created here: Tarzan of the Apes was written in Oak Park, where Ernest Hemingway was born. Early movies were shot here — Essanay Studios opened in 1907 and filmed more than 1,000 silent movies in Chicago, including “His New Job” with Charlie Chaplin.
     The first animated animal cartoon character was created in Chicago — but not by Disney. Sidney Smith, a popular cartoonist, drew Old Doc Yak, a goat in striped pants that hit the big screen in 1913. The next year, the Tribune hired the first full-time film critic, Jack Lawson. Chicago also boasted the first full-time professional sportscaster — Hal Totten, an NU grad who joined WMAQ in 1924.
     The first radio soap opera started in Chicago — “The Smith Family,” in 1929. The next year, the Chicago Daily News experimental TV station, W9XAP, was broadcasting three hours of programming a day. Twenty years later, All My Children debuted live, the first daily TV soap.
     The idea of consumer market research started in Chicago — in 1928, when William Burnett Benton at Lord & Thomas spent two months talking to housewives about their preference in toothpaste, trying to win the Colgate-Palmolive account. Leo Burnett cooked up some of the great advertising mascots here.
     Some Chicago innovations were pure accident. In the 1880s, Oscar Mayer was just another Chicago butcher, with his brothers Gottfried and Max. But they were forced to move their shop after landlord troubles and, hoping to keep their customers, began packaging their meats.
     Charles Lubin wanted to send his cheesecakes to a customer in Texas, so he created the frozen pastry industry, naming his company after his daughter, Sara Lee. After Reddi-Wip, developed at a Chicago dairy, was introduced in 1948, American consumption of whipped cream doubled in three years. Paint in spray cans was invented here, too.
     Technology was always big here. The most significant technological moment to occur in Chicago was the first man-made nuclear chain reaction, achieved by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field on Dec. 2, 1942.
     As far back as 1876, telephone pioneer Elisha Gray developed an early prototype of the telephone in Highland Park, and a case can be made that his invention was stolen by Alexander Graham Bell.
     The Congress hotel had the first air-conditioning — cooling its Pompeian Room in 1907 with a carbon-dioxide fan-coil system.
     The public first heard loudspeakers in Chicago — working together, Bell Telephone and Western Electric installed 10 loudspeakers at the Olympic Theater in 1912 — to transmit sound-effects from backstage. The first stereo tape recording was a similar joint effort — General Motors was looking for a way to analyze engine noise, and Magnecord came up with stereo tape to help out, then realized it also had consumer value, demonstrating it at the U.S. Audio Fair in 1949. The Shure Radio Corp. opened on Wells Street in 1925 and became the largest manufacturer of phonograph cartridges in the country. In 1953, it introduced the first mass market wireless microphone — the “Vagabond.” It cost $800.
     Chicago was a center for automatic entertainment — the first jukebox that played records was manufactured by the Automatic Machine & Tool Company in 1906. The first self-contained coin-operated soda machine was the Vendrink, which saw its test run at the Lincoln Park Zoo in 1934, when there were a dozen different pinball machine companies in Chicago, where the game was invented.
     The first event broadcast on the first telecommunications satellite, Telestar, was supposed to be a speech by John F. Kennedy. But the feed went live early, so a Cubs game against the Phillies at Wrigley Field in July 1962 was broadcast instead. The first movies on VCR tape for home use were offered in the Chicago area by Sears in spring 1972, according to Patrick Robertson in his Robertson’s Book of Firsts.
     Not every invention was monumental. Brownies were invented at the Palmer House, Twinkies in Schiller Park. Lava lamps were made on Irving Park Road. Chicago holds a central place in candymaking — Lemonheads were invented here. The Weber Grill, too.
     Chicago has a key role in fast-food history. The crenellated designs of White Castle outlets that popped up around the country in 1921 were based on our Water Tower, and of course, McDonald’s took root in Oak Brook.
     The superlatives go on — as everyone knows, President Barack Obama was a Chicago law professor, while the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere is — still — Willis Tower. Major Internet firms such as Groupon sprouted in Chicago. Someone is waking up this morning and creating something new and fantastic that will be lauded in the Sun-Times at the city’s bicentennial, on March 4, 2037. Something to look forward to with pride.

             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 4, 2012

* Since this ran, subsequent research suggests that Chicago was perhaps among the first cities to use balloon frame construction, but not precisely the first.

'We are just going to abandon all those discoveries'

Anna Vlasits

     Seeing clearly is literally the life work of Anna Vlasits.
     She is a young neurobiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, studying how neurons work together in the retina of your eye to make vision possible.
     "I'm a basic researcher," Vlasits said. "I'm brand new to UIC. I started my lab about a year ago."
     Jane Miglo is a biology graduate student trying to cure ovarian cancer, which kills 140,000 women worldwide every year.
     "My whole lab focuses on women's health," Miglo said. "It's already an area that's underfunded in comparison with the lethality of the disease."
      Michael Schultz is a senior director at Portal Innovations, a biotech venture capital firm in the West Loop that operates shared lab space for startups. He knows firsthand how the most obscure research can blossom into practical applications.
     "You don't know what's going to come from it," he said. "One example are these GLP1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy treating obesity. The first one was discovered in the saliva of a lizard, and now it's the biggest drug ever and hugely helping the obesity crisis."
     None of the three are professional agitators. None have ever organized a public protest before. But the trio is part of the effort behind Chicago' s "Stand Up for Science" rally Friday at 12 p.m. at Federal Plaza, one of 32 rallies taking place nationwide to draw attention to the enormous damage caused by the Trump administration's wholesale slashing of National Institutes of Health research.
     "I'm at the stage I'm just building," Vlasits said. "I got a startup fund from the University of Illinois to get going, but after that I need NIH funding. That is the way biomedical research happens in the United States, through this funding, and to have it get slashed and denigrated — it's a really scary place to be as a new researcher."

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Why is this still a surprise?

     This is what I don't understand.
     We know Trump is Putin's lapdog. We know he is a fanboy of dictators everywhere, because he wants to be one of them. He is on record as admiring the iron boot that Xi Jinping uses to grind down the Chinese people. He has dictator envy.
     We know he is rude. We know he is a bully. And a chronic liar. And a seditionist. 
     So why — why, why, why — would disgusting display in the Oval Office Friday, bullying and berating Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, still come as a shock? To anybody? Why is our intellectual barometer still set so it expects humanity? Why is that still our default?

    That's a sincere question: why? Residual hope? Have we not yet taken Dante's stern warning to heart? Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate.
     "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

     Hope is not a strategy. It's a distraction. One that I have indulged in. No more. I adjure hope. No more.

     Maybe because it's so horrible, we can't get used to it. That sounds closer to the mark. There are tens of thousands of murders in this country every year, but each new one is unexpected. Nobody yawns and says, "Oh, another murder." Cops maybe.

     Perhaps that's it. We've become cynical observers of a crime that happens continually. We've allowed ourselves to be numbed so much, we never seem to truly grasp it. Not really. I was listening to someone on NPR marvel that during the election Trump denied any connection to Project 2025, and yet he has Project 2025 staffers pulling the government apart with both hands, straight out of the Project 2025 playbook. How could that be? 

     They speculated. They mused. Never approaching the truth of the matter: the man is a chronic liar who lies continually. Why is that so hard to accept? It isn't as if it flies in the face of human nature. It's as common as dirt, though the 47th president's special genius. He is a virtuoso of prevarication. 
     Maybe the problem isn't that Trump lies — and why not; those lies certainly are working for him. Maybe the blame belongs to us, to Democrats, to liberal, for our continual gullibility. Our passivity. Maybe that's why we can't change. Because we don't see it's our fault. We don't take this shit seriously. Maybe we never will.

      Maybe the problem is that, taking a cue from Anne Frank, we like to think people are good at heart.
     That didn't work out so well for her, did it?
     So if optimism is a dead end, then what's left? If it's not going to get better, then why even monitor what Trump is doing? Why keep track? The time to push back effectively is past. It passed Nov. 5. Now is the time to put our heads in the sand. Or else to grieve and suffer. And wait.
     That sounds an awful lot like surrender. And I am not a big fan of surrender. As I used to tell my boys when they were growing up, "You can't quit your way to the top."
     A half dozen Republican congressmen could stop this. The country was created to have co-equal branches of government, the executive balanced by Congress and the courts. Congress has just a few too many lackeys, and the Supreme Court was force-fed Trump devotees.
     So it's up to he people to ... what? Protest? Raise our voices to the deaf? That sounds like providing a floor show for the callous. Something for them to sneer and smirk at. Lawsuits? They have been slowing things down, but they eventually get to Team Trump, aka the U.S. Supreme Court.
    Drag our feet? Write essays?
    I have no idea. 

    That's it. No neat ending today. Talk among yourselves. I'm open to suggestions. Otherwise, I got nothing.

Works in progress: Scott Raab

     Writers brandish what most people hide. The secret shame. The festering hurt. What you won't tell your spouse we tell the world. Loudly. While banging garbage can lids over our heads. To attract attention.

      That's how it can feel, anyway. Though what I consider candor seems like throat-clearing compared to the firepower brought to the game by Scott Raab. EGD readers met him last October, when I wrote about his philippic  against LeBron James, "The Whore of Akron," as a On the Night Table feature.

     Usually that would be it. He thanked me for my kind words, and that is where people typically move on. Only he did something unusual — he asked for my phone number. We spoke last week ... for over an hour. He sent me his story in the March Esquire — you can read it here, if you are a subscriber.

     Just that act is ... well, it's a very me thing to do. I'm always pushing my work on people — how would they ever read it otherwise? — handing books to lunch mates who accept them between thumb and forefinger, squirming, as if they hadn't touched a book since high school. I also send relevant columns to random readers who write in. 

    I read the essay Raab sent, "New Dad: What Happens When You Suddenly Have a New Family at 71," about a couple of the kids he fathered as a sperm donor 30 years ago who track him down and ... well, whatever you imagine the outcome would be, this is different. 

    I asked him to write a little something about parading his darkest secret for our Works in Progress, and he submitted the following. I'm sorry the Esquire piece is paywalled — it contains many sharp, true, funny lines, the sharpest, truest, for me, being, "Nothing teaches you to love harder than not getting any when you need it most."

     I started writing poetry in sixth grade. It was the early 1960s, and my subjects included the JFK assassination and the still-unsolved murder of a young woman in suburban Cleveland, my home town. I was a scared, helpless kid alone in a world full of tragedy and secrets--especially my own family’s. Writing was feeling. It was also a shield, a sword, a creed, and the only path to truth and freedom I could see. Lord, I was a hurting kid, and writers thrive in manure all over the world, and folks imprisoned by secrets live lives of fear and ignorance, and there is no freedom in it. As a writer, I take no prisoners and keep no secrets.
     “Nothing human is alien to me,” said Terence. Good enough.

If it isn't raining babies, then why these showers?

      "Shouldn't it be, 'She's a girl'?" I said, pointing to a package of paper plates announcing, "It's a girl!"
     My wife furrowed her brow, pondering the question.
     "No, sorry, joking," I said, immediately backtracking. "Just being a grammarian."
     We were in Party City, prepping for the baby shower we're throwing for our older son and his wife, whom you saw married in July. Showers are co-ed now, or so I'm told, which is why my son and I will be there. (If you aren't invited, don't feel bad; we had to limit the guest list to mostly family, to keep it a manageable 40 people).
     Coed baby showers feel strange. I always thought they were strictly No Boys Allowed.
     Times change. But despite societal shifts, the choices at Party City were binary — "BABY BOY" said one sign. "BABY GIRL," the other. Boy stuff was blue. Girl stuff, pink.
     There was no third choice — no purple "It's an ungendered person!" plates. Then again, Party City went bankrupt and is having a final sale, so maybe those were snapped up already.
     Doubtful. Though honestly, I'd be fine if people bought those. I like living in a free country and can perform the mental gymnastics — impossible for many, apparently — of understanding that the freedom I enjoy myself can be utilized by other people who hold other beliefs and values not my own. I don't need to posit imaginary harms and oppress blameless individuals in order to feel good about myself. Freaky, right?
     Democrats, watching in stunned horror as the scaffold of what seems like a fascist state is set up, piece by piece, sometimes fault their general acceptance of the trans community. If only we'd been a bit more judgmental and callous to the vulnerable among us. If only we'd coughed into our fists while kids were bullied, we wouldn't have to sacrifice our government now — fairness in girls high school athletics being the great moral issue of our time.
     That doesn't scan for me. Then again, I'm a roll-with-developments sort of guy. I accepted the news, before we even learned the gender, that we were not to even imagine kissing the baby on the head, lest we poison it with our germs.

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Flashback 1997: To serve and protect: Jews answer the call

      I spent some time Wednesday dubbing old videos onto my Google Drive — it was fun to watch family scenes I hadn't looked at in ... 28 years, such as my older son's second birthday party. It reminded me how I'd use my family to pivot into larger issues, such as this column on Jewish first responders. What's interesting below is how I casually nail the profession that the babe would go into. As if it were foreordained. The Shomrim Society is still around.

     "That's a fire truck," I said to my son, getting down on one knee and pointing as the red pumper screamed by. "Those are the firemen going to fight a fire. Maybe you'll grow up to be a fireman someday."
     He just gurgled and cooed, but my wife furrowed her brow.
     "Don't tell him that," she said. "He's not going to be a fireman."
     Normally I'd let the comment slide. I knew what she meant: our son was going to be president of the United States, or the doctor who cures cancer or — be still the fluttering of our fondest hopes! — a lawyer.     
     But her comment strayed into one of the few areas I care enough about to argue over, so I made a little speech: "Firemen are heroes," I began, elaborating with some of what I had seen covering fires over the years as a reporter.
     The Paxton Hotel, with trapped residents leaping out of the windows and being tended to in the middle of the street. The Rose of Sharon Baptist Church, that tremendously cold day on the West Side. How the rose window looked, eerily backlit by the flames. How after part of the roof collapsed and a firefighter was lost, his comrades kept searching for him, even after the fire was out, even when it was obvious that he had to be dead and heavy equipment would have to be brought in to find him. How they didn't want to leave. How, the next day, the firefighters dug through the freezing rubble with their hands.
     I don't think I convinced her any. Public safety is not the sort of profession that Jewish parents, generally, lay out for their children. We don't grow up to be firefighters or – even worse — police officers.
     Which is why I was surprised, and pleased, to find there are nearly 300 members of the Chicago chapter of the Shomrim Society, the national organization for Jewish law enforcement officers.
     "Our membership is not limited to Chicago police officers," said officer David Welbel, an investigator in the organized crime unit and president of the Chicago chapter. "It's open to any branch of law enforcement. We have a lot of suburban police, a lot of county people, some federal agents assigned here in Illinois."
     Jewish police officers tend to be acutely aware that they are contradicting a stereotype.
     "It's just not a traditional role for a Jew to go into," said Sgt. Bruce Rottner, a 25-year veteran working neighborhood relations in Rogers Park. "I've always felt the uniqueness of being a Jewish police officer. I don't shove my Jewishness in anybody's face, but I'm proud of it. It was just wonderful, in 1972, walking into my first Shomrim Society meeting and seeing other police officers who were Jewish."
     The Shomrim Society — the name means "guardians" in Hebrew — is mainly social and philanthropic. Its big annual event is a dinner dance in the fall. Not all Jewish Chicago cops are members. "We have what I refer to as `closet Jews' on the job," Welbel said.
     Which brings up anti-Semitism. Both Welbel and Rottner say they've encountered only traces of anti-Semitism in their years on the force.
     That wasn't always the case. During the Great Depression, when Jews first entered the classically Irish police force in significant numbers, they were met by "thinly disguised contempt, and disbelief that they would make good cops," Arthur Niederhoffer wrote in his essay "The Jewish Patrolman."
     Ironically, Jews were faulted, not so much for their religion, Niederhoffer noted, but for having gone to college, generally. That made them "the target for the anti-intellectualism that policemen shared with many other Americans."
     Rottner was one of three college graduates in his police academy class in 1972, and he remembers being told by a police commander that "college people tend to get bored on the job and don't make good police officers."
     Welbel's own parents — Czechoslovakian Jews who both survived Auschwitz — were dubious about their son's joining the police force.
     "They didn't like it," he said. "Traditionally, law enforcement is not a profession that young Jewish men would seek. The encouragement in the family is always something of higher achievement; being a lawyer, being a doctor or, if not that, a CPA."
     But Welbel, 43, had dreamed of becoming a police officer.
     "I always had an interest in law enforcement as a child," he said. "I always admired those guys: the uniform, the authority, the squad cars, the whole ball of wax."
     As so often happens, his parents came around to see his point of view.
     "But now they've adjusted to it," Welbel said. "They're glad that I joined the Police Department because they see that's what I'm happy doing.
     "Besides," he continued, "they see my brother in business for himself, and they see he's constantly aggravated. They say, `You don't need the aggravation.' For me, I enjoy my work very much. It's easy going to work, and not too many people can say that."
     "Many of us as adults don't get to do what we wanted to do as kids," Rottner said. "This is what I always wanted to do: be a policeman."
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 2, 1997

Mac's Deli offers hot dogs with mustard, relish and hope

Ken Taylor

     As a student of both recovery and hot dogs — a proud graduate of both the Chapman Center, when it was in Highland Park Hospital, and Vienna Beef's rigorous two-day Hot Dog University — I couldn't refuse an invitation to slide by and check out Mac's Deli.

     Ken Taylor was dead. Or close enough to dead. Overdosed, on a hospital gurney, motionless, waiting for a doctor to make it official.
     "I had an accidental overdose of fentanyl and cocaine; I literally died," said Taylor, 60. "All of a sudden, my breath came back. I gasped."
     "Welcome back, Mr. Taylor," a doctor said. "You're one lucky man."
     People can make their own luck, and Taylor decided to get busy.
     "That was a wakening moment for me," said Taylor, supervisor at Mac's Deli, the cleanest hot dog stand in the city of Chicago, opened last November and run by recovering drug addicts and alcoholics at Haymarket Center in the West Loop.
     Every addict has a story they tell to keep themselves honest, and Taylor shared his as the half-dozen workers under him prepped Mac's Deli for the lunch crowd, pregrilling burgers and wiping down already clean surfaces.
     On June 8, Taylor got out of prison after more than a decade behind bars for robbery. A drug habit is expensive.
     "I've been in and out of prison for the better part of 30 years — my whole adult life," said Taylor. "I used to live and lived to use."
     On June 10 he went back to his old stomping grounds. Waiting for him there was his old friend cocaine, laced with the fentanyl that is now mixed into everything.
     "That was not my intent to go use," he said. "I went down there just to be social. Next thing I know, I was ready to be pronounced in the hospital."
     He ended up at South Suburban Rehabilitation Center, which recommended Haymarket, the city's largest provider of addiction and mental health services, treating 12,000 Chicagoans a year — 95% earning less than $10,000 a year. It's a busy place.
     "When I came down to Haymarket they didn't have a bed open," said Taylor. "It was on a Saturday, and he told me, 'Come back Monday morning and I'll get you in.'"
     Do you see the flaw in that plan? Taylor did.
     "I told that guy, if you let me leave here I will not make it back here Monday morning," said Taylor. "He saw that I was serious. He said, 'Let me see what we can find.'"
     "That guy" was Jose Castro, manager of central intake at Haymarket.

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