Flashback 1987: IIT simulator puts budding engineers on right track

     I wrote a reaction to the Heat Index embarrassment for today. But finishing it, I thought, "This should be in the paper." My bosses agreed. So you'll have to wait until tomorrow for that, though it is on the Sun-Times web site now if you want to read it sooner.

    Until then, the column mentions this story, written for the school guide 38 years ago, shortly before I was hired on staff. I think it's still interesting. IIT still trains railroad engineers and operators, but I couldn't find evidence that the simulator is still around.

     Tim Reed, Wes Maness and Tom Joyce took a diesel locomotivfe through the Powder River Basin last month without leaving Chicago. 
     They pulled out of Gillette, Wyoming, and steered five locomotives and 110 railroad cars through the region's coal country. The 15,000-ton load, said Maness, in a deep Texas drawl, was "almost a mile and a quarter of train."
    It wasn't what they were used to in Chicago.
     The cabin rattled and shook. The clackety-clack from the wheels alternated with the shriek of steel against steel as the train rounded a curve. A whistle blast wailed mournfully.
     Reed, Maness and Joyce were taking a trip toward becoming railroad engineers. The locomotive they were driving is the Research and Locomotive Evaluator/Simulator, know as RALES, at the IIT Research Institute on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
     Learning to become an engineer at IIT means more than just riding the RALES. Huge trains need to be handled delicately, "like driving a car without your shoe," said Maness. "One nudge can tear the train in half."
     Reed, sitting at the controls, kept one hand on the throttle, the other on the dynamic brake. He gazed steadily at the view ahead of him, trying to find the right combination of throttle and brake that would keep the train from either stopping cold or gaining so much speed tha tit would go out of control down a steep incline.
     "It's very realistic," said Maness, who has been with the railroad 13 years, five as a brakeman and eight as a conductor. "I wish we had more time with this thing. It's scary."
     The hills of the Powder River Basin are from a film, projected on a white wall in a darkened room. At the center of the room is the upper part of a diesel locomotive, mounted on six large hydraulic pistons that gently shake the cabin back and forth. Out of sight is a brightly lighted control room, loaded with monitors, color data readouts and dials.
     A computer directs the hydraulics, the film and the sound effects to simulate real situations.   
     As Tim Reed moved the throttle, the film sped up. If the locomotive slowed down too suddenly, the computer delivered a persuasive "thud" that lurched the cabin in the same way the trailing cars would bump into a slowing locomotive.
     Reed, Manes and Joyce, all from Wichita Falls, Texas, are in the final stages of their training to become engineers. They were practicing on the RALES for their examination, which will determine whether they will be permitted to make the step from conductor to engineer.
     In the old days, they would have been tested by a human road foreman sitting in the cab next to them. Now aspiring engineers are graded by the unflinching eye of the computer.
     "The machine doesn't care how big you are, how much you talk, or don't talk," said Laurence Rohter, a senior engineers at the institute.
     The engineers are required to perform a variety of maneuvers. They go up and down steep grades, execute unplanned stops and read signal sequences.
     "It's a lot more difficult than I imagined," said Maness. "A lot more than just tooting the whistle. An engineer has to think two miles ahead and a mile and a half behind."
     RALES cost $8 million to build, and went into operation in 1983. When it isn't being rented to railroads (at $250 an hour) to train engineers, it is used to test new equipment and "human stress factors."
     For example, instead of incapacitating a working locomotive to install a new type of control panel, the panel can be tested under laboratory conditions on the RALES. The cabin can also be made to reproduce challenging situations, such as 120 degree temperatures, to see how crews operate.
     "This is as close to real as you can get," said Maness, studying the map of his route's slope. He tapped the top of a hill with his finger.
     "A 15-second wait right there might take me four miles to correct. it's possible at any point to fail this test in 15 to 20 seconds."
     Meanwhile, Tom Joyce studied the same map, giving instruction to Tim Reed, driving the RALES train.
     "The minute you get off this hill, going 21, you set your brakes up," he said.
     A graph on the computer shifted as the air brake clicked in on each car.
     "If you don't set up the brakes right, the cars will bunch into you," said Joyce. "There's 100 feet of slack [in the train]."
     Reed points to the various controls and describes what, in driving a train, he has to be aware of.
     "You're looking at your amp, to see how much power you have, looking at the air flow indicator, to see how much air you have to stop with. This is just like sitting in an engine."

             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 10, 1987

      

NYC statue shows our limitations

"Grounded in the Stars," by Thomas J. Price (Photo courtesy of Times Square Alliance)

     At lunchtime Monday I walked a Rocky Patel cigar from the Iwan Ries cigar shop on Wabash to Gibsons on Rush, pausing to smile at the Irving Kupcinet statue south of Trump Tower.
     I knew Kup. He enjoyed a good cigar, and I considered walking over and blowing a puff in his direction, as a benediction. But time was short, so I kept going, wishing, once again, that his left hand, currently extended in a sort of "I give you the city" wave, could somehow be rearranged into a gesture more fitting to the namesake of the building that replaced his newspaper home.
     The Kup statue did not cause a lot of controversy, which is a shame because the Sun-Times columnist liked nothing more than to stir the pot. He loved to call out racists, and sprang out of the blocks early — in the 1940s he would catalog the snubs suffered by Black soldiers and entertainers, and scolded the Chicago Bar Association for refusing membership to Blacks, claiming to be a social club and not a professional organization. Kup pointed out that social club dues are not tax-deductible. Suddenly the CBA saw the light.
     He'd have a field day with the outcry after "Grounded in the Stars," the realistic statue of a 12-foot tall Black woman unveiled in Times Square April 29. The New York Times called the reaction a "roiling debate," though it's really part of the frenzied purge of Black people from American institutions, government and history. The howl of hurt over the statue, the work of London sculptor Thomas J. Price, is not a discussion, but the typical self-own that racists do when confronted with people unlike themselves doing otherwise ordinary activities — riding a bus, sitting a lunch counter, being represented as a statue — while in the process of being Black.
     “This is what they want us to aspire to be?” the Times quoted Jesse Watters, a Fox News host, gasping. “If you work hard you can be overweight and anonymous?” He called it, “a DEI statue."
The overweight crack is unjustified — I'd say she's of standard heft found in most people in this country and looks like she could snap Jesse Watters like a breadstick.
     As for anonymous, honoring symbolic women is something this country excels at, from the 19-foot "Statue of Freedom" atop the Capitol building that Watters' pals recently got off the hook for invading and defiling on Jan. 6, 2021, to a certain large gal in a spiked hat standing at the entrance of New York Harbor, given to the United States by France back in the day when we were smart enough to welcome people who want to be Americans.
     Chicago is peppered with statues of imaginary women, from the golden "Statue of the Republic" in Hyde Park to the way cool art deco Ceres atop the Board of Trade.
     The city has an anonymous woman at its heart — the Picasso sculpture at Daley Plaza — a woman's head, rendered in the same COR-TEN steel as the building behind it. Yes, when it was unveiled in 1967, Chicagoans boggled. Confronted with the female face Picasso had been drawing and painting for half a century, they saw everything from a praying mantis to a baboon.
     But that's par for the course. Bigotry makes people see what isn't there. David Marcus, a Fox News digital columnist, looked at the placid visage of "Grounded in the Stars" and saw "an angry Black lady." I'd call her expression somewhere between serene and bored.

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Irv Kupcinet, by Preston Jackson

"Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris"

     The "Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds" show at the Art Institute is small. Not Caravaggio small — that 2023 offering had just two of the master's paintings, plus three works influenced by him. 

     The Kahlo show is a handful of her paintings over three rooms, well larded with ephemera — a love letter from Kahlo, in English, not particularly poetic ("I love you my Nick. I am so happy to think I love you, to think you wait for me..."), Kahlo's Parisian address book. Too many examples of books assembled by Reynolds, an American bookbinder who had a salon in Paris, supercharged by her partner, Marcel Duchamp, and his work, along with surrealist pals like Salvador Dali, and various pals such as Alexander Calder and Jean Cocteau, are included.

      The Reynolds collection is owned by the Art Institute, and kudos to them for realizing they could generate far more interest than it ever could garner alone by strapping the trove to the rocket of Kahlo, her houseguest for 32 days in 1939. Without Kahlo, you couldn't prod museum goers into the "Mary Reynolds, Bookbinder" show if you used bayonettes. 
     We took in the show Sunday — the place was packed, Kahlo having exploded over the past few decades into a cultural icon for her general badassery — the unflinching gaze at herself in all her broken strangeness, her unstoppable back story. Salma Hayek's smoking portrayal in a 2002 biop didn't hurt.
    To me, she's folk art — too inexpert to be anything else, but making up in color and panache what she lacks in technical skill. You can't but admire someone willing to paint themselves as an arrow-ridden stag, even if the stag isn't quite standing in the forest so much as floating above it.

     Enough. I'm not going to be the guy dissing Frida Kahlo. She made the most of the talents she had, which is all any of us can do. And I cared enough about her to make a point to go see the show. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the show is expressed in the museum's web page about it, which opens: "Unveiling Frida Kahlo’s work for the first time in the Art Institute galleries, this exhibition..." Really? The first time? Kinda late to the party, are they not? The Art Institute has been taking pains to be more inclusive, to try to proactively avoid the lash of the cultural warriors, and Kahlo checks a lot of boxes: female, Mexican, struggling with disabilities. 

     Not to transgress against art by reducing her to her specific qualities, which is the original sin of identity politics. To be a great artist, you need to combine image and impact, to transcend your materials and your limitations and become something more than what you are. Kahlo clears that bar with room to spare.

      "Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds" runs until July 13.

The straw that broke the nation's back

 

     My wife's birthday was Saturday. So we did whatever she wanted. Starting with breakfast at the Cherry Pit Cafe in Deerfield. She placed her traditional order — oatmeal pancakes with blueberries. And I placed mine — spinach, onion and mozzarella omelet, well-done.
     We chatting amiably while waiting for our meal. Matthew brought two large blue plastic glasses of water and two drinking straws.
     You don't need a straw to drink a glass of water, unless you're in a hospital bed. But straws have been in the news, literally a federal issue. On Feb. 25, President Donald Trump issued an executive order, "Ending Procurement and Forced Use of Paper Straws," which begins: "An irrational campaign against plastic straws has resulted in major cities, States, and businesses banning the use or automatic inclusion of plastic straws with beverages. Plastic straws are often replaced by paper straws, which are nonfunctional ..."
     You could debate the word "irrational." Plastic straws foul the environment, and even leach microplastics into your body. In 2019, California banned them in full-service restaurants, unless requested by customers, and other states and cities followed suit. Both the European Union and Canada banned plastic straws in 2021. The next year, Chicago passed its own Single-Use Foodware Ordinance, but in classical City Council style, there were so many loopholes and exceptions — O'Hare and Midway eateries are off the hook, for instance — that critics called it "greenwashing," aka, a measure that looks environment-friendly but doesn't do much.
    I idly picked up the straw, ran my finger over the paper sheath and felt a telltale bump. This wasn't just any straw. It was a bendy straw. Flexible straws were cool when I was a child and they're cool now. I tore off the paper, felt that deeply satisfying scrunch of expanding the little accordion section by bending the straw, popped it into my water and took a long pull.
     You could also argue about that "nonfunctional" slur at paper straws. As much as I admire flexible plastic straws, I also have fond memories of paper straws. The kind with red stripes. Yes, they could crush in a lunch bag, or collapse while drinking, and you would have to carefully squeeze them back into shape so your milk could flow. They could get soggy. Sometimes you would try to poke them through the little foil hole into the sealed container of milk — for a while we had these pyramid milk containers you could only drink from with a straw — and the straw would get crushed. But in general, I got through 13 years of public school without feeling lingering ill will toward paper straws.
     Not so the president. Somehow, a technology that any 6-year-old can master eluded our nation's leader, who clearly has had some bad, almost unbelievable, experiences with paper straws.
      "These things don't work," he said, signing the bill. "I've had them many times. On occasions, they break. They explode. If something's hot, they don't last very long."
     They explode? And who but a moron drinks a hot beverage through a straw of any kind?

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'Henry isn't a bad boy at heart'

     

     Friday's column mentioned that the Juvenile Protective Association got its start supplying probation officers for the newly-created Chicago juvenile court, the first in the nation. Which I knew because I featured its debut in my 2022 book, Every Goddamn Day, in this entry:

July 3, 1899

      The official opening is not until Wednesday. But Henry Campbell, 11, is here now. So Judge Richard Tuthill, showing the flexibility essential in juvenile court, convenes the first in the world two days early. 

     Campbell, of 84 Hudson Avenue, is accused of stealing. The complainants are his parents, Frank and Lena Campbell. They are present in court. Along with a crowd of reformers. 

     As with most social change, the Illinois Act to Regulate the Treatment and Control of Dependent Neglected and Delinquent Children did not happen quickly or by accident, but required years of effort. The idea is to keep children under 16 out of Chicago jails and downstate prisons, where they are housed with hardened criminals. 

     Henry's teary mother doesn't want him in an institution. “Judge, Henry isn't a bad boy at heart,” she says. “I know he's been led into trouble by others.” She urges that her son be sent to live with his grandmother in upstate New York to “escape the surroundings that have caused the mischief.” Judge Tuthill agrees. 

     Before hearing the next case — four boys “of tender years” incarcerated at the poorhouse at Dunning — Tuthill, a Civil War vet, reads aloud the last part of the new act. 

     Officers finding a wayward or neglected child, Tuthill says, should not use undue haste in hurrying the little one into court, but should confer with parents or clergy, using every effort to set the child right without resorting to an arrest, save as a final measure. 

      He urges that law, when applied to children, always be “liberally construed.”

     Research-loving reader Jill Anderson did some digging after this was posted, and came up with a bit more information on Henry Campbell. 

     "He was born 9 Oct 1889 and died 4 Feb 1946 in Chicago," she writes. "He married a woman named Evelyn, but died young at 56."

     Although only a little young. The male life expectancy in 1946 was 62. Here's the family appearance in the 1900 census. Thanks Jill.

The vagal response

 

Salvador Dali, "Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach" (1938)

    Occasionally a reader will remark that they had to look up the definition of a particular word in a piece of mine. Not so much as a reprimand, but just to let me know. And I don't feel sorry for making them do so, because there are a lot of words, nobody can know them all, and regularly checking definitions is both a hallmark of curiosity and the path to acquiring knowledge.
     I look up words myself, all the time. For instance, I was having my coffee and Cream of Wheat Friday morning, reading the Sun-Times — I always read it first, before the New York Times, out of loyalty.
    My attention focused on David Struett's article on testimony at the Jayden Perkins murder trial. The sort of story a reader naturally is drawn to — a grisly murder, a gripping trial, a fainting juror. Five paragraphs in, the doctor, who Struett said "switched from giving testimony to helping the juror" — smoothly put — said, "I think you probably just had a vagal response."

     "A vagal response?" Does that mean anything to you? It didn't register with me, and I groped at what "vagal" might mean. Based on the first three letters, I immediately thought, "vaginal." But surely that couldn't be it. Perhaps a matter of shared derivation. 
      What does the word "vagina" actually mean? I felt a momentary chill, because I was straying into gender politics territory. Best be on my guard. Center? Cleft? Fundamental? Those didn't sound right. As I often say: no need to guess, we can just find out.
     "Vagal" is the adjectival form of "vagus," and according to Dr. Google AI: "The vagus nerve, also known as cranial nerve X, is a crucial part of the autonomic nervous system, playing a key role in regulating involuntary bodily functions like heart rate, digestion, and breathing." Who knew? Not me. While you can't always trust AI — on Tuesday, when I joyously nosed the car into the drive-thru at the White Castle on 111th Street, AI told me that a cheese slider is 340 calories, when that is actually two — that definition sounded accurate, and I did no more digging. You have to go with your gut on these things, provided you have a good gut.
    So what is the etymology of "vagina"? It traces back to the Latin word vagina, unsurprisingly enough, which in ancient times meant, not a sexual organ, but the scabbard you sheath your sword in.  The word took on its current meaning in the Middle Ages, which seems apt. 
     The unchanging quality of the word reminded me of something I was thinking of about 3 a.m. that morning, when. I was awake and musing over the alphabet, which I sometimes do, trying to sleep (it's soothing; judge me harshly if you must). The opening letters of the English alphabet, A, B, C, D, line up with the opening letters of the Hebrew alphabet, א (aleph), בּ (bet), ג (gimel), ד (dalet). (The "C" and "G" sounds being very close). Which means a kid learning his ABCs down the street is going through the same drill of the same sounds that a Jewish boy in Babylonian captivity learned on letters drawn in the dirt.

    See what I mean? Something comforting about that.

Grandmothers to the rescue, with wisdom, patience and doughnuts

     Social media tears down girls. According to a UNESCO report, there is a direct correlation between how much time a girl spends online and increased emotional damage. A Facebook study found that a third of girls say when they feel bad about their bodies, Instagram makes them feel worse. Girls are 50% more likely than boys to report being cyberbullied. Plus — stop the presses! — TikTok is addictive.
     How to combat such a widespread, happiness-destroying influence? In Chicago, one of the most powerful forces for good known to humanity is being sent into battle, a voice of comfort and wisdom going back to the beginnings of time:
     Grandmothers.
     "I come here every Tuesday to sit with the young ladies and do different projects — planting flowers, or making different objects they like," said Delores Durham, 62, waiting in the office at Wendell Smith Elementary School on West 103rd Street in Pullman, bearing donuts. "Just having normal conversation to see where their mind is at. What goals they have in life. I'm just trying to be an encouragement to them. I raised two daughters on the West Side of Chicago myself."
     A volunteer who joined Grandmothers Circle last year, Durham was met by Erinn Boone, a licensed clinical professional counselor and coordinator of the program run by the Juvenile Protective Association, a venerable Chicago social service agency founded by Jane Addams in 1901. Originally the Juvenile Court Committee, its purpose was to provide probation officers to the first juvenile court in the nation, founded here in 1899 to keep children from being sent to adult jails.
     She hands around a piece of paper showing various emojis: happy, angry, bored, surprised.
     "I need you all to tell me how you're feeling," Boone says. "Pass it around."
     The girls warm up. They are happy and tired. Goofy and tired. Quiet and tired. Boone detects a theme.
     "Everybody's tired — is it the weather?" she asks.
     Or maybe something else. Students at Wendell Smith face troubles beyond social media — 94% live in poverty, according to the Illinois State Board of Education, and almost a quarter are homeless. The chronic truancy rate is 32%. And layered upon that, all the usual pressures facing middle-school girls.

     "I was having a conversation with another school and we started talking about friendship, and how you can tell someone is a friend," says Boone. "Then we started talking about rumors, and how rumors get started and drama — but I know that's nothing you all deal with here, right?"
     That challenge — preventing the adult world from getting its hooks into kids — continues.
Durham and Boone go to greet nine sixth grade girls, ages 11 and 12, just finishing lunch on trays — chicken fingers, applesauce, cartons of milk. The girls barely register their arrival.
     "Y'all energy seems real low today," observes Boone. "It's a very Monday kind of Tuesday."

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