Flashback 1999: Now's the time for him to chart his own course

    Today is the 38th anniversary of my joining the Sun-Times, a day I traditionally reach back into the files and highlight something from the archive. This column appealed to me because, to be honest, I write about myself so goddamn much, it's a relief to see me focusing on someone else for a change. 

     This column ran the summer I crossed the ocean with my dad for the book, "Don't Give Up the Ship." Our New Zealand press lord, Nigel Wade, would not give me time off — he was offended that I asked — so I had to file a column, three days a week, from the sea, using the molasses-dripping-off-a-stick-in-winter satellite modem in the radio room. Focusing on the ship's only Chicago cadet was a no-brainer. 

    The obvious question this column leaves us with is: what happened to Terry McCabe? My gut told me, as mentioned at the end, that the son, grandson and great-grandson of police officers has a strong chance of becoming a Chicago cop. But CPD, natch, did not respond to my inquiry, and a desultory online search came up empty. He'd be in his late 40s now. He seemed like a nice kid; I hope he's having a good life.

     ABOARD THE EMPIRE STATE — So how does a 21-year-old South Side Irish kid end up aboard a ship, 300 miles due north of Puerto Rico, steaming toward Barbados at a brisk clip of 17 knots?
     "I like water," offers Terry McCabe, the only Chicagoan attending the State of New York Maritime College, the oldest of the nation's six colleges teaching young people the honorable and endangered art of navigating the high seas. Every summer, 400 underclassmen and -women set sail for eight weeks aboard the Empire State — a 37-year-old cargo ship converted to carry trainees — cruising from the Bronx and heading, on this summer's voyage, to Charleston, Barbados, Naples and Wales.
     I suggest to the 1996 graduate of Mount Carmel High School that while many people like water, few sail the seas. He digs for a better explanation.
     "I was a lifeguard at Rainbow Beach, at 79th and Lake Street — also at Kennedy Park," he says. "This is what came to me, I guess."
     It is gratifying to see your city well-represented, and McCabe, as Maritime's lone Chicagoan, does just that. He was vice president of the student council, president of the 50-member Emerald Society, and wrestled at 171 pounds. The cadets have their nicknames embroidered on the pockets of their blue boiler suits, and McCabe's "Scrappy" is a remnant from his days on Maritime's now-defunct rugby team. Five-foot-eight "on a good day," he made up the difference between himself and the typical rugby behemoth with pure grit. Maritime prides itself on a certain quasi-military discipline, and so disbanded its rugby team after realizing that rugby placed its cadets in the general vicinity of other collegiate rugby teams, and thus such venerable rugby traditions as the Naked Beer Slide.*
     Probably just as well. While McCabe's older sister is a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, his blood is not navy but Chicago Police Department blue. His great-grandfather, Peter McCabe, was a Chicago cop, as was his grandfather, John McCabe, as was his father, also John McCabe, who just retired as a detective at Area 2 violent crimes after 30 years on the force. His brother, named — and you saw this coming — John McCabe Jr., is a fourth-generation Chicago cop, currently on leave.
     Despite that long tradition, McCabe — who took and passed the police exam last March — is in no rush to settle down at 11th and State, certainly not before seeing the world. And he has already seen much more than the typical 21-year-old from Mount Greenwood. This is his third cruise_the past two summers took him, among other places, to Spain, Portugal, Germany, Bermuda, England and his ancestral Ireland.
      He wasn't overly impressed. Asked his assessment of the countries he's seen, McCabe replies: "They're all the same." Pressed for something more profound, McCabe, who plays bagpipes in the Chicago Stockyards Kilty Band, admits "Ireland was actually pretty cool."
     McCabe has reasons to be nonplused. Not only is he from Chicago, but the Maritime College is not your run-of-the-mill state institution either. Tucked on the very northeast tip of New York City, where the East River flows into Long Island Sound, the college is built around Fort Schuyler, an 1830s pentagon of stone with formal parade grounds and slit gun ports and enough nautical memorabilia scattered about to quicken even a Midwesterner's dusty heart, such as a massive bronze five-bladed propeller salvaged off that greyhound of the seas, the SS United States, and displayed as if it were sculpture.
     "(The campus) is one of the things I like most about it," says McCabe. "It's hard to believe it's in the Bronx."
     It is, but we're not. Not anymore. The Bronx is 10 days and 1,300 miles behind us. Shipboard life for cadets falls into routine. "You're either on watch, or working or in class," says McCabe, a 1st class boatswain — sort of like a handyman on the ship. They need a handyman, given that the vessel is basically 12,000 tons of pumps, blowers, winches, watertight doors, condensers, conduits and wildcats that haul up 12,900-pound anchors on massive chains with links 14 inches long.
     "You don't usually use heavy machinery in college," McCabe notes.
     The news about the maritime industry typically sounds so grim — all those 400,000-ton Japanese supertankers with crews of a dozen or two — but McCabe, entering his senior year, doesn't think he has spent the last three years training for a dwindling profession.
     "I have more options than (I would at) any other college," he says. "I'll graduate with a degree in marine transportation and I'll also have my U.S. Coast Guard license for unlimited tonnage. So they gave me the best of both worlds here. You can ship out, you can work on land. And my degree is so inclusive, you can do anything and everything, from maritime law to maritime insurance."
     He doesn't add "to being a cop" but that's where I'd bet my money. The lure of the sea is mighty, but it drains away compared to 100 years of family tradition. And besides: How many police officers can figure out where they are with a sextant and a starry night sky? We could use one, someday. But Terry McCabe is in no rush. He has those supreme luxuries of youth: time and a world awaiting.

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 6, 1999

* Something I knew about because I had witnessed it first hand at a Big 10 rugby party held at Northwestern Apartments in 1979.

"Please consider it could save a life"

     Occasionally someone will ask me if there are any columns I regret writing. And the honest answer is no.

     Well okay, a few touch a nerve, and lead to a couple unpleasant days. Sometimes emails take a week to tail off, even two. That column where the editor sent me to buy an assault rifle that vectored off into the Fox News reality distortion field. The one about the First and Second Amendments where I used "child porn" in the headline, not realizing how that term excites Red Staters. Those lingered, unpleasantly.
     But most ripples pass. There is one, however, whose repercussions roll on through the years.
     It was Aug. 29, 2018, and I was cutting through Daley Plaza — back when people walked around the Loop, going places. I came across a protest held by "targeted individuals" — people who believe they are the center of vast conspiracies. I accepted a flyer, took a photo, and left, and later talked to their spokesman and wrote a column.         

      As I try to do when writing about the troubled, I strove for a gentle touch and to respect their point of view. 

     It began: 

     "Strangers are following you. Teams of them, coordinating their surveillance. Recording you. Attacking you with sonic devices. Maybe burning you with lasers. Maybe implanting grain-sized trackers inside your body. You can feel the hard bumps under your skin.

     "You are alarmed, naturally, and turn for help to those you trust: your family and friends. Maybe law enforcement. Only they don’t believe you. They might even act like you’re the problem. Like you’re crazy.
     "Welcome to the world of Targeted Individuals, a loose confederation of those, in their words, subject to the “growing crimes of organized stalking, surveillance, abuse and electronic harassment.”

     Later in the piece, I quote a psychologist who says, in essence, that these people are disturbed.
      What I did not realize was that targeted individuals, reading this, would miss that nuance, and take me for a kindred spirit. 

     On Wednesday, I received an email beginning:

      "Hi my name is Sharon and I have videos of hours of similar events that you have shared in this recent post. I have actual videos of strange events happening for more than 4 years now. I would very much like to meet you and share my experiences on this matter because I believe that if enough light is shed on this story more people who can provide some kind of proof, then maybe our laws will change to protect people with mental illness..."     

     Concision here seemed my friend. "No,"I replied, "thank you."

     That drew a second email:

     "Hi Mr. Steinberg. I just saw your response to the recent email that I sent to you earlier this morning. I can guess why you’re saying no and I understand. I would like to, however, share this with you. I’m 53 years old and I’m being tortured into insanity and I can’t take it anymore. I have had to abandon the state where I was born in because they ran me out from torturing me so bad.
     "My family members want nothing to do with me and my only child is about to lose her mother because I can’t mentally take it anymore and my body, mind, and soul just wants peace now.
      "Please reconsider it could save my life. I was supposed to end it today then I read your article.Thank you for your time and for reading and responding to my email."

     What to say to that? "Tortured into insanity." The presence of the child made ignoring it impossible, at least for me. When you deal with such people, it's best to get them to talk. I fired off questions designed to ascertain how she views her situation, and perhaps say something to plug life:

     "Let me ask you a few questions: 1) Who is torturing you? 2) How are they torturing you? 3) Why ... why you, and not somebody else? 4) Have you explored the possibility that this might be due to something else? 5) How old is your child?
     "We only know two things about this life for certain: 1) death is permanent. 2) However long we are alive, we are dead for far, far longer.

     That didn't work. She wrote:

     "Mr. Steinberg I’m not trying to get into a battle of wits with you. I’m not that smart.
      "Second, everyone always ask those exact same questions. My daughter is 33.
     'I’m not good with the back-and-forth thing I asked you and you said no I asked you to reconsider and we’re doing this back-and-forth thing and I’m not good at that.
     "I really think you should take a look at some of my videos. I really think you should reconsider and take a moment to actually meet with me face-to-face and sit down and talk to me. You won’t be disappointed and you won’t regret it.
     "I can’t answer your questions of who is doing it because I don’t know who. I can only tell you that I am zapped in places on my body day and night 24 hours a day seven days a week, 365 days out of the year and it’s painful....

      There's more, but you get the idea. I called her number and left a message saying, in essence, "I'm sorry, I don't have the skills to help you but I encourage you to find somebody who does." I expected it to end there. But I got a text:

     "Hi Neil, thank you for calling me. I didn't realize that you had called me. I'm hanging in there. I decided to fight last night. I started posting any video that I could find that showed what I was talking about to TikTok, Twitter, Facebook ... It's horrible to be kept awake for more than 24 hours for no apparent reason just because someone can. I've been up for four days. I'm still functioning, but I'm grateful because if you hadn't said no, and I hadn't gotten desperate enough to reach out and hear you say no I don't think I would've fought back ... Please with me the best. I wish you the best. Thank you, you're a kind soul."

      I asked her if she minded my posting our exchange. She didn't, adding, "I was afraid and now I'm a fighter."

     Which is about as good an outcome, for now, as I can imagine. 

Sun-Times takes a hit, but keep on ticking

     

                                                       Photo by Jessica Koscielniak

     As a rule, you're not supposed to draw attention to what isn't in the newspaper. The idea is, you've got everything right here, in your hands. All the news you need to know today, plus a horoscope, comics and tomorrow's weather. Anything that isn't here doesn't matter.
      But the key rule about newspapers is: There is no rule that can't be scrapped as circumstances dictate. Sometimes the stylebook gets set aside. Sometimes the loss is too big to ignore. When iconic movie reviewer Roger Ebert died in 2013, we didn't go back to running reviews that were bare synopses under jokey pseudonyms like Mae Tinee.
     We honored the man, recognized the loss, then moved forward, as best we could. The 35 staffers — including 23 in the Sun-Times newsroom — who took the Chicago Public Media buyout and are mostly leaving Friday are too important for the paper to cough into its fist and hope you don't notice. First, because they made a sacrifice, saving $4.2 million a year in costs to help the newspaper survive. That's news, and our job is to report the news. Second, you will notice. Their loss will be felt.
     I'm feeling it now. For me, it's personal, starting with John O'Neill, who has been the primary editor on this column. He's saved me from a thousand gaffes and probably a few career-ending misfires. He's my friend, as is his wife, Suzanne McBride, who often edits this on Sundays. I've been to their house, and they to mine. They were at my younger son's wedding, and I know their children, Jack and Grace.
     Richard Roeper is the biggest name to go. He is a star in his own right, holding his own with Ebert after he replaced Gene Siskel on his TV show in 2000. The author of seven books, Richard is a fearsome poker player and — what mattered to me most — a really good writer. We were good friends in our salad days — he was at my wedding — before I disappeared into marriage and parenthood, two snares that Richard neatly sidestepped.
     I will miss another friend in Rick Telander, who was the king at Sports Illustrated when the paper snagged him. He played football for Northwestern, and when he was drafted by Kansas City, Rick and a buddy drove straight north until they hit Lake Superior, where he bought 30 acres of land. Eight autumns have been highlighted with visits to his compound, to breathe the crisp air, smoke cigars, eat big steaks and plunge from the sauna into the gelid cold lake. He let me hang around even though I sometimes admit that I don't follow sports. While he played one-on-one with Michael Jordan, I once almost asked Jordan his name, because to me he was just another player in the Bulls locker room. Yet somehow Rick and I got along.
     Rick Morrissey is another vital sports columnist who is going, plus Bears beat writer Mark Potash and White Sox writer Daryl Van Schouwen. When I heard Annie Costabile is leaving too, I went looking for a text she sent me years ago. I had written something rounding up Chicago sports, and at the last minute cut out the Sky, for space — "how could I?" she demanded. She cared deeply about what she did — a defining characteristic of people who work at the Sun-Times, and was sincerely indignant, as befits someone who changed the way Chicagoans view the WNBA and women's sports.
     We lost most of our editorial board, and the future of editorials at the paper is uncertain. Lorraine Forte headed the board, running a staff not half as large as what was required to do the same job at the Tribune. Tom Frisbie left —soft-spoken, he edited my work when I joined the Sun-Times school guide as a freelancer in 1984, his quiet calm a counterpoint to my frantic, gerbil-on-a-wheel ambition. Back when we did endorsements, every trustee from every small town from Addison to Zion traipsed through the editorial board room, a process that was saved from devolving into pure confusion by the organizational skill and good cheer of Marlen Garcia.
     Our features department was mostly Miriam Di Nunzio and Darel Jevens, who edited Roeper and whose clever headlines for Dear Abby have been seen by millions of readers. With them leaving (although we are grateful Di Nunzio has agreed to stick around for a few months), I don't know who's going to try to step into their shoes, but I'm sure glad it won't be me. They did yeoman's work.
     Every election night about 5 p.m. the staff would gather in the newsroom to hammer out a game plan. We were looking at a long seven hours hours of pinballing around the city until drinks at the Billy Goat, and we all took our marching orders from Scott Fornek, decked out in the election night sweater vest he wore for luck. He had joined the Sun-Times when the Chicago Daily News folded in 1978, and carried that special cachet that Daily News alumni enjoyed, having worked at the same paper as Carl Sandburg and Ben Hecht.

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"You and I alone ... could fight this royal battle."

 

Human brains stored at the Anatomical Gift Association of Illinois, 2013

     So I spoke to a neurosurgeon last week — in my professional capacity, I rush to add. Not for personal reasons. His hospital had pitched some achievement or another, and I, in that they-offer-you-a-hand-and-you-grab-their-elbow manner of mine, replied, "You know, I've never even spoken to a brain surgeon." 

    It worked. We talked, got on well. So now photographer Ashlee Rezin and I will, at some point in the near future, scrub up and watch this man operate on somebody's brain.
     Which is cool. Though not my job, per se, as a daily newspaper columnist. Except that I've made it my job, my portfolio being the realm of the interesting, and operations are interesting. I've watched a heart transplant and a lung transplant, a kidney transplant and Chicago surgeons in Vilnius putting a stainless steel rod in a girl's leg. A hip replacement — that was me, a video of the operation I underwent. Because surgeries are not something the average Sun-Times reader gets a chance to peer at, and I don't pass up an opportunity to share one. When a doctor at Northwestern rebuilt my spine, I spun it into a three part series. 
     I wouldn't mention this — no point in ballyhooing a story that could be months away from print — except that, jarred by the cleaver taken to the staff this week, I was tempted to begin this by cataloguing all the positions that the Sun-Times once had that are now gone. A jazz critic and a classical music critic, a book editor and an assistant book editor. A TV critic. A food editor. A travel editor. A medical writer. Five full-time librarians. 
     All lost. Along with 35 colleagues this week. The temptation is to focus on the past, on the loss, to sit in the ashes and cry. "We used to have a corporate jet and now look at us!" And maybe I should do that. But honestly, I don't have the heart for it. Nor the time. There was a moment Wednesday when I just felt so tired, and wished I'd left with them, and wondered what the future will be like, where the will to go on will come from.

     Then I shook it off, like a dog after a bath, and thought about watching brain surgery. The future for me will include looking at a living human brain. And talking to a man skilled enough to fix one. If he can do his job, I sure as hell can do mine. Writing a column, three times a week, trying to comfort Chicagoans living in a country driving to the brink of ruin — that's almost like a type of collective public brain surgery. Reaching into the mind of the body politic and rearranging. 

      That's worth doing, still. I get to focus on what is important or, when need be, completely ignore what is important and take a bubble bath in the trivial. 

     Make no mistake. It is daunting. And difficult. A colleague called Wednesday morning, someone I interact with a lot, and I let that colleague grieve and weep and vent about the various individuals who will no longer be at our side, working with us. No question. It'll be a loss keenly felt. But not insurmountable. I thought of — but wisely did not mention — Shakespeare's "Henry V," after the king fires up his troops to face fearsome odds against an overwhelming French force. 

     "God's will, my liege!" Westmoreland enthuses. "Would you and I alone, without more help, could fight this royal battle!"

    That is bluster. I did not say, "We'll put out the paper ourselves." We could not do that. But I thought it. And at times it might feel that way, to those of us left behind, shouldering an increased burden. We need to always remember that it is an honor to remain in the struggle.  This is a battle worth winning, whatever our reduced numbers, however stacked the odds are against us. Losing is simply not an option. Or if it is our fate, then we will go down fighting. 

Correction: Dylan Thomas was a Welshman. From Wales.

     Maybe all those years of living in Northbrook while writing about Chicago have made my brain soft. But when constructing Monday's gathering of Irish poets for St. Patrick's Day, I tucked in Dylan Thomas. Who of course was Welsh. Having been born in Wales. And lived his life there. As a Welshman.

Dylan Thomas

     I knew that. I've written about the pride Wales has for him. The information was somewhere in my brain.
     Yet not readily accessible when the moment called for it. Because there was Thomas, on page two, tucked after W.B. Yeats and before Seamus Heaney and Oscar Wilde.
     My blog readers leaped on the error when the column posted at the stroke of midnight — well, 12:13 a.m.
     "Dylan Thomas is Welsh, not Irish," someone commented, anonymously.
     The only thing worse than being awake at 4 a.m. is confronting your failings at 4 a.m.
     "Ah," I replied, at 4:03 a.m. "You'd think 'A Child's Christmas in Wales' would have been the giveaway. Do you think I can get through today saying I consider him Irish by marriage? Probably not. Maybe I'll try saying, 'We're all Irish on St. Paddy's Day.'"
     I went online and tucked a version of that into the column, pretending that I knew all along. I often wish I were as smart, or as eloquent, as the guy whose thoughts run under my picture in the newspaper.
     Shamefully, some rebellious mental sub-circuit immediately tried to justify the error. Well, I thought, we consider Oscar Wilde Irish, even thought he lived for years in London, so why couldn't...
     No.
     Wales isn't that far from Ireland...
     Don't.
     I actually checked: 154 miles from Swansea, where Thomas was born, to Dublin. That's like saying someone residing in Peoria lives in Chicago.
     Mistakes are a good way to air whatever corrosive narrative is running in the back of your mind, unnoticed. Mine, apparently, goes something like this: "You're a hack and a bumbler who can't do his job properly, who puts on this pretense of knowing stuff but in fact is the kind of ignorant stumblebum who would include Dylan Thomas among IRISH POETS when in fact he famously, no, VERY famously, is a [obscene gerund] Welshman from [the same obscene gerund] WALES!"
     It's good to get that out, from time to time. Cleansing.
     I don't like to make mistakes. But I do like copping to them, just because the ability to do so is rare. When you see someone whose ego is so inflamed — no names, please! — that any suggestion of error is an impossible affront, then taking responsibility for mistakes is a sign of confidence, almost a superpower.
     Still, gaffes in print make for a long day. The first newspaper reader weighed in at 9:03 a.m.:

     "Steinberg. Have you been drinking that green beer? The author of A Child’s Christmas in Wales? Maybe we say in Chicago that everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day but Thomas was not.
John D Cameron
(former waiter at the Quadrangle Club, not Irish either)"

     I sighed, deeply, then replied:
     "No, to the beer, green or otherwise. But yes, you are right. I own the sin. Maybe seeing his face on all those pub walls led me astray. It's fixed online. As for the print edition, you are the first to point it out. No doubt there will be more. Thank you for writing."

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"Don't give up the ship."

 

Battle of Lake Erie (Unidentified artist: Fenimore Art Museum)

     The good news is that the blog post I wrote for today turned out well. The bad news is that it turned out so well, I decided to run it as a column in the paper on Wednesday.
     That does suggest a hierarchy, where columns are expected to have a bit more heft than blog posts. I suppose that is true. Since blog posts run — all together now — every GODDAMN day, they can be lighter, more personal, less, oh I don't know, newsworthy.

     Though blog posts do have aspects that columns can never enjoy.  I can, for instance, swear in blog posts. 
      Fuck.
      See? That could never happen in the newspaper. Though I've tried. Every time I get a new editor, I explain that I'd like to begin a column, "Fuck this," and introduce the word into the paper for the first time ever, to untie the hand bound behind our backs. No dice. 
     With the blog, I can root through my photos, grab a picture, and riff on it. Like the primitive painting above of a crucial moment in the Battle of Lake Erie, on Sept. 10, 1813, when Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry left his crippled flagship, the Lawrence, and crossed over to the Niagara to carry on the fight. 
     It's always meant a lot to me for various reasons. 

     First, the battle took place about an hour from where I grew up, in Berea, Ohio. And visiting the Perry's Victory & International Peace Memorial on Put-in-Bay has been a regular summertime treat for myself, and my children after me. (The peace being celebrated is between the United States and Canada, a sadly relevant detail given our president's insistence on ridiculing and threatening our literal closest friend).

      Second, Perry had taken the words of Capt. James Lawrence, "Don't give up the ship," and had them stitched into a battle flag. A sentiment I used for my 2004 memoir about crossing the ocean with my father.

     Third, the flag is a reminder of the importance of flexibility to victory. The "Don't give up the ship" flag was flying from the Lawrence the moment Perry, umm, gave it up. Which would seem contradictory, even hypocritical. But that is what the tide of battle demanded. A tactical retreat that was both necessary and worked. The flag was still flying when Perry and his men reboarded the Lawrence to accept the British surrender. Sometimes you pull back to win.

    Fourth, Perry had perseverance. The British were far stronger than we were in 1812, when war broke out. They were hot to avenge the loss of 30 years before, and claw back land that wasn't theirs, the sure sign of tyranny. They burned the President's House — though that is not how it became the White House, to cover the scorch marks; a myth of history too popular to disappear. 

      We need to cleave to what actually happened. As in 1812, the situation in our country is bad. Powerful forces that would douse our freedom stride the land, largely unopposed. We need to remind ourselves that at numerous times in American history Things Looked Bad. We have been rocked back on our heels more than once. Suffered humiliations worse than this. And while this assault from within, this traitorous rear guard assault, is perhaps the greatest threat our democracy has ever faced, our nation will face it, and it will prevail. Because if a weak, self-obsessed, ignorant, blundering swine of a man like Donald Trump can destroy America, the true essence of America, then America was not the strong bastion of freedom that I still believe her to be. Now we are brought low. And a great number of things will have to happen before we can stand tall in the world of nations once more. But a firm commitment to never surrender is key to making those things occur. Don't give up the ship. Unless you have to. Then do, to carry on the fight another way, on another ship. The key is to never give up the struggle, never indulge in defeat, in surrender, a luxury that none of us can afford.
    There, that will do for a Tuesday.

Oscar Wilde quipped, Dylan Thomas drank, W.B. Yeats shopped

W. B. Yeats (National Portrait Gallery)

     W.B. Yeats went shopping on Michigan Avenue, where he was so taken with a wardrobe trunk that he bought it, despite having been admonished by his patroness, Lady Gregory, to avoid extravagance during his 1914 American tour.
     The Chicago Daily News editorial page, unaware of Yeats' spree, patted readers on the back for welcoming him:
     "When Chicago, the home of the tired business man, can furnish a profit to grand opera companies and an enthusiastic audience for Poet William Butler Yeats, does it not indicate that idealism hereabouts is triumphing over materialism?"
     Sophisticated visitors not only scratch our boostery itch, but remembering them returns greatness to a human scale. Yeats later regretted his luggage purchase, because his topcoat wouldn't fit —giving a whole new meaning to his line, "the center cannot hold" — until his hostess, Poetry Magazine founder Harriet Monroe, showed him how to fold it properly.
     St. Patrick's Day is a moment when parodies of Irish culture, such as green beer and plastic derbies, get far more than their due. So I use the holiday as a pretext to plunge into more authentic, less generally embraced aspects of Gaelic heritage. In past years I've joined Yeats in lauding Hazel Lavery, the Chicago woman who graced Irish banknotes for 50 years.
     This year I found myself thinking of Irish poets who visited Chicago, such as Yeats, who came here three times. I got the idea by noticing that Sunday was the 75th anniversary of Dylan Thomas drinking at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap — Thomas was Welsh, of course, but we can consider him Irish by marriage, and of course everybody's Irish on St. Paddy's Day. Much myth tends to surrounds such events, but Thomas both signed the bar book and penned letters home on stationery from the Quadrangle Club, where he stayed.
     "My love, oh cat," he wrote to Caitlin Thomas on March 16, 1950. "This is not, as it seems from the address above, a dive, joint, saloon, etc., but the honourable & dignified headquarters of the dons of the University of Chicago. I love you."
     Seamus Heaney also drank at Jimmy's, as my pal Eamonn Cummins observed when we had lunch last week with Brian Cahalane, Ireland's consul general to the Midwest. midwestern United States.
     Ireland doesn't just send poets. She also ships her share of undocumented immigrants, and I wondered whether they are feeling the boot of the federal government on their necks the way, oh, Venezuelans or Ukrainians are.
     "We've been told informally the Irish aren't a target," Cahalane said. "We don't have a sense of a crackdown. The focus centers on immigrants coming across the southern borders."
     Wonder why that is. It is worth remembering, on a day when the Irish are being joyfully embraced as beloved civic darlings, just how vigorously despised they were when they first came to America. The Irish were dirty, lazy, physically ugly. And drunken, of course — that we mark the occasional with a public bar crawl is one of those ironies that would shame us if we ever thought about it.
     So rest assured, in future years, when Chicago's bountiful Venezuelan community is being feted, their rum lofted, their poetry read, with every restaurant serving up trays of arepas and pabellón criollo for Simón Bolivar's birthday, the current federal government vendetta against them will be just another bit of colorful history, like Mrs. O'Leary's cow, which we don't even realize is a petrified slur reflecting the common view of the Irish as careless firebugs, made quaint by time and lack of context.

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