'Grandma, were you afraid to die?'

Maida Mangiameli with granddaughter Sloane in 2020.

     Happy birthday Sloane! Eight years old, tomorrow. Sorry about being early, but my column doesn't run on Tuesdays, and in my profession — newspapering; ask your grandmother about it — a day early is far better than a day late.
     We've never met. But your grandmother is a reader. She contacted me in October, wanting me to write something, and after patiently waiting for ... gee ... six months, told me the story about how your birth saved her life and how you inspire her every day.
     Which struck me as the sort of story a little girl should hear: how she saved a life, just by showing up. Because if you can do that, without even trying, imagine what else you may do someday.
     Your grandmother, Maida Mangiameli, lives — thanks to you — in Hawthorn Woods. When your mom, Kate, was pregnant with you, she did something many new mothers do — try to make the world as welcoming a place as she could for you.
     There isn't much that can be done about, say, the nation sliding toward totalitarianism. But she could make sure her daughter's grandmother wasn't smoking like a chimney.
     "I was a heavy smoker my entire adult life," Mangiameli said. "When my daughter and son-in-law told us we're going to be grandparents, they asked one thing: Could I please quit smoking?"
     Smoking is a terrible addiction — an addiction is when something is very bad for you, but you do it anyway, because you can't stop. Mangiameli had attempted quitting before.
     "I tried for my own two girls," she said. "But for that baby ..."
     It took a full year. But Mangiameli, now 75, gave up smoking. Which is when her troubles really started.
     "Within a day of that last cigarette, incessant coughing began," she said. "I went to Immediate Care for a chest x-ray. The doctor called me the next day and told me it was lung cancer."
     Around 90% of people who get lung cancer are smokers. Making the bad news worse: the thought that she'd brought it on herself.

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Assembling the IKEA cabinet of happiness

 

 
     So I went to the opening plenary at the Organization of American Historians at the Sheraton Thursday. It was a brisk walk across the Loop from Madison Street to North Water and Columbus Drive, and it put me in, shall we say, maximum high spirits, seeing the people, the buildings parallaxing by.
     I got there about 4:10 p.m., checked in for my press credentials.
    "I'm from the Chicago Sun-Times," I said. "Or what's left of it."
     Which is very on-brand for me — acknowledge the elephant in the room, say the unsaid thing, spill more of my business than is purely necessary. Shutting up, as I often also say, is an art form I struggle to master. Still.
     There was 20 minutes before I was supposed to meet a reader who is a member of the organization — her email lured me there — and there was a concourse filled with booths from book publishers. Why not plunge in?
     Here I did an unthinking thing. Regular readers know that in 2009 I took a trip out west with the boys, then 12 and 13. When it was over, I wrote a book about it, pieces of which pop up here from time to time, like dead fish floating to the surface of a poisoned pond. It was supposed to be a keepsake for them, but for that to happen someone would have to publish the thing. So I'd have something tangible to hand them someday. Otherwise its a bunch of electrons that could wink out of existence with a hard drive crash. And look, here were these publishers, all around me.
     So I blundered up to one after another who might in theory be interested. There was the University of Illinois Press, which I'd actually sent the manuscript to, years ago. They rejected it with a sniff of "Not an Illinois book," ("But it begins in Illinois!" I'd objected. "And ends there! And involves three Illinoisans on an adventure!" No dice).   
      To my credit, I did try to browse the spreads of new books — but honestly, while the covers were well-designed and they were all in English, the subjects didn't interest me. If I'd been encouraged to take whatever volumes I wanted home with me, I don't think I'd have snagged one.  The subjects were obscure, rococo and uninviting. 
     The only book I actually flipped through was "Food Autonomy in Chicago" by Pancho McFarland, published by the University of Georgia Press. Years ago I'd been to the The 70th Street Farm in East Englewood with Sarah Stegner, then chef at the Ritz, to check on her tomato plants, and somehow imagined that a book with that title might connect me to similar stories related to food autonomy. Stuff I could put in the paper.

     But honestly, I couldn't make sense of the table of contents — the words slid off the page. I didn't take notes on the chapters, and the media at the University of Georgia Press didn't respond to a request for the table of contents. But two paragraphs describing the book from the publisher might give a sense of the thing:

     This examination of a sector of the food autonomy movement in Chicago provides important new ways of understanding race relations, gender, sexuality, spirituality, pedagogy, identity, and their importance to the dynamics of social movements. Additionally, the book explores how revolutionary culture, principles, and organization of American Indigenous, diasporan Africans, anarchist Mexicans and others have been adopted, adapted, or rejected in our food movement.
     In this autoethnography of the food movement, McFarland argues that at our best we work to establish a new society like that theorized and enacted by Indigenous and Black anarchists. However, the forces of Wetiko (colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy) make the work of BIPOC food warriors difficult. Wetiko’s conceptual categories—including race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship—influence our worldviews and affect our behaviors.

     Are you beginning to see what a book on three guys getting lost in Yellowstone Park might not find an eager publisher? I am. 
     Though not on the spot. I presented myself to several editors at several publishers, whose reaction could be best described as a sort of numb disinterest. Being with the Sun-Times meant nothing. Being a published author meant nothing.  I meant nothing.

     What did I expect? Them to leap up and embrace me. "Comrade!" 

     Eventually it came time to go upstairs for the talk — I plan to write about that Wednesday. Afterward, still not grasping the situation, I returned to the publishers' concourse to resume raking my fingers against the brick wall. 

     "We're looking for books about Native-Americans," said an editor at the University of Oklahoma Press, when I finally paused for breath and could register the plea in her eyes, which said, in essence, "Please go away now."

      Suddenly I saw myself as if from afar. A gray-haired man, spewing nonsense. Really, had I been a bum, whoops, unhoused person, living on Lower Wacker Drive, and wandered up, with my layers of jackets and shiny pants and red ruined face and went from booth to booth, asking for a chaw of tobacco, I don't think my reception would have been much different. 

     Feeling quite eviscerated I collected what little remained of my pride the way a person who had actually been slashed across the abdomen by the razor of book publishing circa 2025 might collect his guts in both hands, and waddled out the door, trying not to step on his dragging entrails.

     I rode the train home, grim, and came home. grim, my mouth set, my wife's attempts to boost the mood water off a duck's ass. I grimly made myself  a plain dinner. Cashews. Cheese. A simple salad. Stuff that wouldn't boost my blood sugar. 

     Sometimes the only thing to do is go to bed and hope it makes sense in the morning. 

     And you know what? It did make sense in the morning. I blinked into the world, had one taste of stale grimness, a kind of mental drymouth, spat that out, and starting thinking, belatedly. 

     Looking back on the night before, I realized my mistake. Not right away. For maybe an hour I puzzled over it, like a guy trying to assemble an IKEA cabinet, holding a sheet of instructions in one hand and pawing through an unpromising mess of shiny metal screws and wooden dowels and plastic spacers in the other.

     But eventually an idea took shape, an that idea was this:

     It was my fault. 

     I should have parked my ego at the door. Shut up about the damned book already. I should have asked each publisher what their favorite new book was. Should have asked them about their visit to Chicago. Asked them anything. It's not all about me, obviously. I went in there hot, talking about myself, and should have resisted that and done my damn job. I had set myself up, dropped my guard. 

     How many times have I quoted that damn T.S. Eliot line about humility? It doesn't mean jack shit if you are not yourself humble. Which I'm not. But can be. With work. I've done. On occasion. It takes effort. You can sure as hell try. Harder than I thought to try Wednesday night.

     Not just try, as Yoda says. Do.  There is no try.

     But no shame there either. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you — that isn't T.S. Eliot, but also true. Realizing that it was my fault was very liberating, oddly. The world is the world. Every loser and headcase has a grievance. Certainly a better takeaway than, "You're a loser who can't get his books published." Today is a new chance, a bright shiny span of hours to use as I please. Learn from yesterday's sorrow then fling it away.

     There is an expression in Norwegian, "Du er din egen lykkesmed," which Google Translate puts into English as "You are the master of your own luck." Though my Norwegian friend Gry says it scans to locals as, "You are your own source of happiness." It's too easy, when something makes you unhappy to let it sit in your craw, festering, to accept it on face value, blame others — "Wah, those publishers were indifferent to me!" — when you can also spit it out, rinse, learn something. You have X days to live, and then you wink out forever. How many days, how many hours, are you willing to lose to unhappiness based on things beyond your control? Are you going to be happy? Or not? Your call. Don't look for outside validation. Your own happiness is always within you, though often hiding. You need to flush it out.

Works in progress: Andy Shaw

      I've been doing this columnist/blogger thing for so long that it's possible for me to forget that for many years I was a general assignment newspaper reporter, standing around courtrooms and government offices, waiting for various stories to unfold. And often political reporter Andy Shaw was there too, alongside in the media scrum. 
     We both moved on, me to whatever it is I'm doing here, he to the Better Government Association for a decade and, now, Substack. I've read the piece he links to, and if you'd like to discuss it below, feel free — I don't want to color the conversation, but let him sink, or swim, on his own merits.

     When he asked me to ballyhoo his latest endeavor I said, in essence, "Do it yourself." So take it away, Andy Shaw:

Andy Shaw

     I’ve been writing op ed columns for Chicago newspapers for years—occasionally while I was still covering politics at ABC 7, more frequently when I led the Better Government Association, and now as a good government nonprofit board member and semi-retired observer of the local scene. But I noticed that newspaper layoffs and buyouts prompted many columnists to migrate to Substack, which also appeared to be an increasingly viable option for me since local newspapers don’t pay for content and have become increasingly picky about what they do and don’t want. So voila—here I am!

Diversity more important than ever

John Jones

     The Organization of American Historians is meeting in Chicago this weekend. So if you don't mind, allow me to talk shop with 1,676 scholars and teachers.
     Can I put in a plug for DEI? Someone should. When President Trump roots out efforts to reflect the diversity of this country, he paints the idea of inclusion as some kind of undeserved sop.
     That isn't how I see it.
     Let me explain how diversity is reflected in my work. The 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire was in 2021. I volunteered to write the newspaper's stemwinder article about the fire. Because I'm crazy.
     Kidding. Because I was writing a book of Chicago history, and stumbled upon an approach I thought could make the story sing. A huge peril of teaching history is boredom. When everybody knows a familiar story, or thinks they know: Mrs. O'Leary's cow, a lantern, and the reader drifts off.
     I had one fresh fact, pulled out of Carl Smith's book, "Chicago's Great Fire": Mary Todd Lincoln was living here at the time of the fire. This floored me. I had no idea. Smith tucked that in as an aside on Page 48.
     To me, it was fresh and fantastic. Lincoln's widow! In Chicago! One guideline I use is, if I don't know something, nobody knows. If a fact excites me, I can use it to excite others.
     I began the tale with how the summer of 1871 was terrible for Mrs. Lincoln — her beloved son Tad died, she sank further into mental illness. And then the city burned down around her.
     That start gave me my structure. I would hand the narrative from one witness to the next — the maligned O'Learys, a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post, the night watchman, a fireman. It wasn't a story about flames. But about people.
     The form gave me flexibility — I could include anybody who encountered the fire. Some fell into my lap — a seamstress, Mary Jones, who would be radicalized by the fire and become Mother Jones, an important labor figure.

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Good day in the city

     This space skews toward the negative — concerns about the national health, complaints about this or that, criticism of various and sundry, the constant airing of problems and worrisome situations.
     Even with occasional joyful forays into birds, food and etymology, happiness gets the short shrift.
     Though I am not — not not not — a complaining, querulous person. I hope. Rather I am, I believe, a generally happy person. Though you wouldn't know it, reading this blog.
     Why? Perhaps because happiness is so fleeting, or banal, or private. It feels uninteresting and gets overlooked, making me seem gloomier than I actually am, a suspicion that hit me suddenly standing on the Washington bridge Wednesday afternoon.
     Granted, I had just enjoyed an unusually restful, social day. Taking the 7:43 train downtown with my wife. Making phone calls in the Great Hall of Union Station, where I noticed a man photographing a stuffed toy frog. I ran over and interviewed him — that'll be in the paper eventually. I walked away buoyant, his life story tucked in my pocket like a $20 bill snagged from the sidewalk. Do I have a great job or what?

      Then to Lou Mitchell's — and how well does that perk up a day? A spinach and mozzarella omelet, well done. Thick toast. With a historian participating in the big conclave of the Organization of American Historians in Chicago this weekend. I'm going there Thursday afternoon.

      That lasted a couple hours. Just as we stepped out of Lou's into the rain, a cab pulled up and dropped someone off. So we cabbed over to River North, where I hung out at a Starbucks, then walked over to Gene & Georgetti to meet a pair of former colleagues, both retired. We spent another couple hours happily jawboning away, until we finally got up, with hugs and handshakes and promises to meet together soon.

     There was nothing to do but go home. Firing up a primo Rocky Patel Vintage 1990 brought along for just such a purpose, I walked it down Wacker Drive, the rain finally ended, the sun out, the afternoon waning.

     Crossing the Washington bridge, I glanced north, and saw the yellow Water Taxi steaming toward me. I love the water taxi. It's just a beautiful boat. And a sweet ride. Back when it cost $2, it was an astounding bargain, and now that it costs $5 it still is. I try to catch it whenever I can from the foot of Madison Street to the Wrigley Building. It's like taking a little vacation.

      Pulling out my phone, I took three shots, and then lowered the camera just in time to catch the eye of the water taxi operator, a bearded fellow. I raised my thumb and smiled. He raised his thumb in reply and smiled back.

     Bingo. That was it, happiness. And I realized happiness can be caused by many things, but connection to other people is key — whether talking for hours in a restaurant, or flashing a quick thumbs up to a guy you've never seen before and will never see again, but for a single second, shared a moment of optimism. Isn't everything great? Yes, everything is great. Right now, right here. 

     I paused at the Daily News Plaza, took up my usual position just north of the Madison Bridge, puffing away, looking at the river and the Civic Opera Building. I checked my email. There was a phone message from a reader, 88, who was unhappy. She has been a subscriber for as long as I had been alive, enjoyed my column mightily until recently. Because I had taken the Lord's name in vain — a trio of interjections of "Jesus!" — and she is a Christian. So she's scrapping her subscription, renouncing the folly of my column.

     I phoned her back — I told myself I shouldn't, but that doing so would spoil my mood. These calls never go well. But it was that very good mood that prodded me onward. Her daughter put her on the phone. She explained how she enjoys my writing about my boys, and loved watching them grow up in the newspaper, but she can't cotton having her Lord's name tossed about as an exclamation. I took a deep breath, then told her that I'm sorry; being Jewish, sometimes I miss the significance of such things, and that I apologize, renounce the sin, and hope that, being Christian, she could find it in her heart to forgive me.

     "It'll never happen again," I said, and she seemed satisfied, and I ended the call confident that I kept one reader from defecting from the fold. Sometimes that's all a person needs, to have their concerns heard and be treated with respect. We all need to be seen by each other, every now and then. It makes us happy.

     

Jim Johnson, who bridged the divide between hard news and ribald humor, dies

Jim Johnson

     Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996 promising to "build a bridge to the 21st century." But when newsman Jim Johnson went to read that memorable phrase on the radio, it came out as "build a bridge to the 21st secretary," a malapropism echoing the president's famous roving eye.

     "Jim Johnson was a professional news gatherer and on-air reporter with amazing punchlines lurking in the weeds," said radio icon Steve Dahl.
     Mr. Johnson, who managed to straddle the divide between serious news and ribald humor, died Friday near Kansas City, Missouri, where he had gone to live near his family. He was 80.
    In an industry where talent generally survives by hopping from station to station, Mr. Johnson spent his entire career, almost half a century, at WLS-AM (890).
    "He was very adaptable," remembered WLS co-host Catherine Johns, "when instead of doing straight news — a 25-second report from City Hall — they asked him to become a co-anchor, part of a morning show. He adapted to that. When the format changed to talk, he adapted to that. He worked well with all of us, with Fred Winston and Steve Dahl and Garry Meier and Roe Conn."
     "I spent 50 years behind the microphone," Winston said. "Jimmy was the fastest, funniest cat I ever worked with. He was a multitalent, a personality, aside from being a top-shelf, excellent investigative journalist. He was funny, and he was warm, and he was irreverent, and he was loved by everybody."
     "One of the nicest and genuinely funny people I have ever worked with," Dahl agreed.
     "He's dyslexic and would type up his stuff, then hand write over it," said Conn, who worked with Mr. Johnson for 20 years. "He rarely used a computer screen to do the news. He liked to read it off the paper and would get lost in his own handwriting. He had these amazing 'Jim-isms.'"
    "Fighting AIDS" turned into "fighting eggs." "Vice President Biden" morphed into "Vice President Bin Laden." Then there were the "nine men who were killed to death."
     "He had this reel of these things we could constantly play," Conn said. "It was drop-dead, laugh-out-loud funny."
     And if you think Mr. Johnson's gaffes don't belong in his obituary, think again.
     "He would be so offended if you didn't have fun with this," said his daughter, Kansas City newscaster Alexis Del Cid. "The greatest way to honor my dad was humor."

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Mr. Johnson was born in Chicago. His parents were May and Charley Johnson, a reporter at City News in the 1930s and later with the Chicago Sun.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Photo by Ashlee Rezin

      I subscribe to the Washington Post. Because it is an excellent newspaper. So much so that, for years, when Amazon would come under fire for some lapse — employees collapsing in sweltering warehouses, or forced to wear adult diapers because they weren't permitted bathroom breaks — I'd dilute my contempt for the company by thinking, "Well, at least Jeff Bezos funds the Washington Post."
    Not complete forgiveness. But partial mitigation.
    Yes, when Bezos refused to endorse Kamala Harris, and showed up at Mar-a-Lago to kiss Donald Trump's ring, I was alarmed, and considered cancelling my subscription. But the Post is still an important news source. Once the snowball of rationalization starts rolling downhill, it grows and grows.

     Then at the end of February Bezos announced that the newspaper's editorials would now be exclusively "in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Which is akin to the paper announcing in 1938 that its editorials would emphasize two main values: the need for people in the Sudetenland to be reunited with their German brethren, and the importance of Japan having access to Southeast Asian oil. In essence, the paper would now climb on a chair, bang two garbage can lids together and shout "Hurrah for Trump!" on its editorial pages.

     Honestly, I was taken aback. But still kept my subscription. Out of habit at this point.

     Bezos was joined by others — Tim Cook, from Apple. And of course Elon Musk, who stepped away from running X, nee Twitter, and SpaceX, and being the richest man in the world, to become Trump's right hand man.  Wielding a chainsaw — literally and figuratively — carving apart the government that we who are not billionaires so often rely upon to keep our lives from going down the toilet. I know that I soon will be leaning heavily upon the Social Security system that I have paid my hard-earned money into since I was 16 years old and scooping ice cream at Barnhill's in Berea. How will I live after the cash I expect from Social Security is diverted into the already bulging pockets of billionaires?
    Nor am I alone. You don't need me to tell you what a confusing, frightening time this has been, with entire offices of government shorn away while Trump tries to trash one Constitutional right after another by executive order. Here birthright citizenship, there 20 million Americans cut from the voting rolls by ginning up artificial barriers for them to clear on their way to the ballot box. The First Amendment will be next.
    Friends ask me how to resist. What small, ridiculous symbolic act they can perform to ... what? Register their displeasure in the great cosmic record keeper in the sky? Utter a bleat of unease as we all are stampeded over a cliff by our mad shepherds? Raising our voices. If only the czar knew. "I've got the solution, Natasha — we will inform him of our displeasure, through the sincerity of our protest!"

    In your dreams.
    Then clarity came to me. Of course. If you can't beat Trump, join him. Everyone else has. Bezos. Cook, Musk. Better men than I. More successful men. They obviously know something I don't. I may never be privy to their secret, successful thoughts. But I can emulate their actions. Indeed, I must.  

     So wear the red hat, if that will please him. And if you can, mouth the slogans too. Isn't that how Winston Smith ends up at the end of "1984." He loves Big Brother. Love Donald Trump. It's possible, right? It must be. Look how many people do it. Half the country, almost. Half the Congress, by a whisker.
     I mean, the man has done good things, right? Fast-tracking the COVID vaccine. You have to give him that. Saved millions of lives. And moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. That showed those Palestinians! His whole feint to cleanse them from Gaza and turn the territory into some kind of opulent resort. Is that really madness? Or genius? It'll be genius if it works, and as for the Palestinians, well, better off relocated to Jordan than slaughtered by the Israelis. 
    I could go on. Getting rid of the penny — that was a frustration of mine for years.  Trump axed it in a stroke.  Annex Greenland — why not? All the cool superpowers are doing it. China snarls like a junkyard dog, straining to sink its teeth into Taiwan, Russia gobbles up Ukraine. Greenland has all the earmarks of the ideal victim — nearby, defenseless, already cringing, waiting to be kicked.
    Yes, certain actions of Trump's are ... problematic. Shit-canning science by throttling the National Institutes of Health, for instance, and yanking back federal funding for universities that permitted overly-enthusiastic pro-Palestinian protests. But doesn't science typically thrive under some kind of oppression? I mean, look at Galileo. The Inquisition of the Catholic Church was in full swing in 1633, and still Galileo still used his telescope to gather evidence supporting the Copernican heresy of the earth revolving around the sun. What a great moment in the history of science, when the instruments of torture set out before the great astronomer. "E pur si muove," Galileo said. "And yet it moves."
     Okay, okay. That probably never really happened. But isn't that yet another gift that Donald Trump gives us? The gift of wonderment, of being able to embellish a world which, let's be honest, is often just too pedestrian and bland for our purposes? To be freed from the chains of fact, from the constant concern of did this happen or did that happen or does this word mean this or that, or is this action legal under the Constitution? Sweep all that bother away and just trust him to know what's best for us.
     It feels good, right? Freeing. After years of being in the losing opposition, that's a mighty appealing thought. To be on the winning side, for once. And don't Democrats seem to know it? Just by the way they sulk and scratch themselves, staring at their thumbs while the nation is terraforned into a dictatorship before their very, unblinking eyes? Who wants to be on their team anymore, mealy-mouthed little cowards without the courage of their own convictions. Story of their lives, losers who sat on their hands while their better qualified candidate lost an election — ooo, her laugh annoys us, we can't vote for her! — and are now sulking in a corner while the country is torn apart and rebuilt as a totalitarian state. 
     I for one am sick of it. So a change of course. There's no price of entry, no charges of hypocrisy. Half of Trump's cabinet are men who in 2016 were declaring him the greatest threat to the Republican Party since John Wilkes Booth. Nobody is so rude as to clap the Secretary of State on the shoulder and ask him what happened to all that "Little Marco" business. If anyone did, he would look them square in the eye and tell them that Donald Trump is a just and forgiving master, and once you bend the knee, the past is forgotten, at least until you cross him in any way or just aren't useful anymore.
     A decade's worth of columns, slandering Trump? I abjure them and apologize and — poof! — they are gone. Not really written by me. Mislabeled by balky software. Or if they were written by me — and who can be certain of anything anymore? — they are tissues of error created before I'd seen the light and fully understood the scope and majesty of the man. Now fluttered away on the wind, vanished. They never existed. We are living in the new world now. Times change, and we change. with them. 

    So all hail Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, gloria mundi in excelsis. I'm only sorry it took me this long. The scales have fallen from my eyes and I have seen the light. It's a beautiful thing. Come join me. Because those of us who dwell in truth — and truth is whatever Trump says it is, today — we hate to be alone. Or even questioned. Really. Our confidence is that great that any form of dissension burns like thermite. You see how easy it is to shed the past and face the future, boldly, to win through surrender. Join me. Right now, by clicking here. Or else.