Flashback 2001: Essee — The fire, light and love of Kup's life

Essee Kupcinet, right, with her famous husband
and noted singer Frank Sinatra

     Monday I ran the obituary of Sun-Times celebrity columnist Irv Kupcinet. So it seems fitting that today. I run his wife's.

     Reading this now, after 24 years, a few things come to mind.

     First, it might not be written quite this way today. We like to give people agency, and women tend not to be defined quite so much by who they married, even if that is the reason they're being written about. 

     Second, she was buried with a pack of cigarettes in her coffin.

    Third, it is Sun-Times policy to read obituaries to the next of kin — it's the one time in professional journalism where a person outside of the paper is given ... well, not pre-approval, but a chance to react to a story that's going in the paper before it's printed. I'm not exactly sure why that is. A kindness to the newly bereaved, I imagine. Errors are bad enough without fucking up the details of the life of a beloved relative who died a few days ago. So we fix those before the story is published. 

     I remember reading this over the telephone to Kup, a difficult moment for us both.

     She was a firecracker. She was a lady. She was his best friend.
     Esther "Essee" Kupcinet, 84, who died Saturday morning at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, was the wife of revered Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet.
     For more than 60 years, she shared his extraordinary life of fame and celebrity, supporting him in his phenomenal career and working energetically to improve the city they both loved.
     "You can't understand Irv Kupcinet unless you understand his wife," wrote critic Neil Tesser in a 1988 profile. "Where Kup remains even-keeled, Essee flies this way and that, blurting out his unspoken thoughts and giving vent to the emotions they share. In the division of responsibilities that characterizes every marriage, she expresses all that is impulsive about them, while Kup, unruffled, focuses on his demanding job."
     They were a team. She would pass items to him from sources she read that he might have missed. Mrs. Kupcinet boosted her husband relentlessly. In the 1940s, when she was out on the town with him tracking down gossip, she sometimes wore a blouse stenciled with his column's logo.
     "She was certainly one of the most colorful and interesting women in the history of Chicago, a passionate lover of communications and the arts," said Joe Morris, a friend and attorney of the Kupcinets.
     Though ailing in recent years, Mrs. Kupcinet loved cigarettes and wisecracks. She was famous for her sharp, often acid wit. After she volunteered to coordinate the Chicago visit of Queen Beatrix and Prince Claus of the Netherlands, she was stunned to find herself rewarded with the Order of Orange-Nassau in the Rank of Knight, which allowed her to be called "Dame."
     "How should we address you now?" asked an impressed friend.
     "Call me Sir Essee," Mrs. Kupcinet said. "I've been a dame for years."
     She kept her husband — famous for his daytime drowsiness induced by late-night club hopping — awake and on his toes. When he regaled his television audience with the time he had an "audition" with the pope, Essee could be heard hissing from the wings, "It's audience, not `audition,' you idiot!"
     Mrs. Kupcinet, a fan of the theater, was a great supporter of the arts. She was a founding trustee of the Chicago Academy for the Arts. She called it "my school," and the theater department there is named in her honor.
     She was born Esther Janice Solomon in Chicago, one of three children of Joseph and Doris Solomon. Her father was a successful druggist. As a girl "mad for Joan Crawford," she changed her middle name to Joan.
     Her father insisted his children go to college. She met Kupcinet in 1935 when she was a Northwestern University psychology major. He was a football player at the University of North Dakota, visiting Evanston to drop in on a friend who also happened to be her boyfriend.
     Four years later, she and Kup married.
     "I proposed," remembered Mrs. Kupcinet. "I said, `When are we going to get married?' "
     "Never," Kup answered.
     They wed Feb. 12, 1939. They spent their honeymoon in Florida, at baseball spring training.
     After college, she became assistant director of the Psychology Laboratory at Michael Reese Hospital, where she worked for three years. A former dancer, she also worked as a dance instructor.
     When her husband began his celebrity column in 1943, she vowed to accompany him into the whirl of Chicago nightlife.
     "When I first got the column, she was dubious," Kup wrote in his self-titled autobiography. "She thought — as did her mother — that I'd be surrounded by glamor girls at all times.
     "It was true that a lot of other columnists through the years, beginning with Walter Winchell, had at the very least strange marriages or, soon, no marriages at all. Walter never took his wife anywhere, and he was hardly ever at home, so you can draw your own conclusions.
      "Earl Wilson of the New York Post had started his column about the same time as mine, and Essee and Rosemary Wilson decided they weren't going to end up like Walter's wife, that they'd accompany their husbands as often as possible. It was fine with me, (and) we had the perfect menage a trois: the column, Essee and me."
      When Kup lunched with Humphrey Bogart and his new bride, Lauren Bacall, the morning after their wedding, Mrs. Kupcinet was at his side. She danced with Frank Sinatra, dined with Clark Gable and went to a drag ball in New York City with Tennessee Williams.
     They had two children, Jerry and Roberta Lynn, whom they called Cookie and who began her career as an actress under the name Karyn. When their daughter was murdered in Los Angeles in 1963, a week after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, Mrs. Kupcinet was devastated. She went to psychics, trying to contact Cookie, and visited the cemetery five times a week.
      For a year she was, by her description, "a zombie," lifted from her sorrow only by support from notables such as Kennedy family matriarch Rose Kennedy, who wrote to her at the suggestion of television giant Ed Sullivan.
      "Pray when your heart is heavy and you can find no solace, I shall pray for you, too," the president's mother wrote.
     "That letter showed strength such as Essee had never known," Kup wrote. "It inspired her to go on living, as Cookie would have wanted, even though Essee wanted to die with her."
     After her daughter's murder, Mrs. Kupcinet threw herself into support of the arts.
     "We should recognize local talent so they don't have to go out of town to work," she said. "If my daughter had more theater, she wouldn't have had to go to California."
     She and Kup established the Karyn Kupcinet Gallery at her high school, the Karyn Kupcinet Playhouse at Shimer College, a Karyn Kupcinet Center at Little City in Palatine and the Karyn Kupcinet International School for Science at the Weitzmann Institute in Israel.
     In 1982, Mrs. Kupcinet helped establish the Chicago Academy for the Arts, where she was named life honorary chairwoman.
     "If it wasn't for her, this school wouldn't be here," said Alice Gold, the registrar. "She was a wonderful, wonderful lady to this school."
     The Chicago Academy of the Arts will "stand as one of the permanent monuments to her," Morris said. 

      "The great tragedy in her life was the murder of her daughter, Karyn. Confronting this horrible tragedy of a daughter in her 20s murdered while trying to carve out a career for herself in Hollywood, Essee's response was to spend her lifetime creating opportunities for young people by the thousands to create careers in the arts."
     Mrs. Kupcinet also served in a variety of eclectic civil roles. She was a co-chairwoman of the Joseph Jefferson Awards and produced the theatrical awards' television program for eight years, winning a local Emmy for her work in 1977 and 1979. She headed the committee set up in 1983 when Mayor Jane Byrne ordered a songwriting contest to find an official Chicago anthem.
     She also began to work as talent coordinator on "Kup's Show," a role she filled for 20 years. She handled the many stars on the show with the same dagger wit she used on Kup, though sometimes they got the better of her. When she offered George Burns "a doughnut and a kiss," he replied, "How about two doughnuts?"
      She received many awards and honors. In 1974, she received the Prime Minister's Medal from Israel; in 1978, the Easter Seal Society's Humanitarian Award. She also shared many honors with Kup. In 1985, the Better Boys Foundation established a scholarship in their name. In 1987, Mayor Harold Washington presented an award to the couple for their support of the Illinois Film Festival, calling them "the first family of Chicago film."
      In 1988, they shared the Mass Media Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and she was the 1988 Variety Club Woman of the Year.
     In his autobiography, Kup wrote:
     "She's given me happiness, love, a lot of laughs and sometimes a lot of trouble. She's given me some of my best scoops, too. Once, when I was out of town getting a story, she wrote my column. I put a stop to that. She was too good.
     ". . . Neither one of us would tell you we haven't had our problems. Many days, marriage makes one-on-one tackle football on a cement sidewalk seem like a picnic. Yet, like very few couples, through my work and Essee's multi-talents, we've had the opportunity to `see it all,' as she puts it. And we've seen it together."
     One of Mrs. Kupcinet's brothers, Dr. Jerome Solomon, was killed in action in New Guinea in 1944.
     Survivors include her husband; her son, Jerry; two grandchildren, Kari and David; a great-grandson, Sam, and a brother, Leonard Solomon.
     Services will be at 10 a.m. Monday at Temple Shalom, 3480 N. Lake Shore Dr., followed by burial at Memorial Park in Skokie.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 17, 2001

Flashback 2003: 'Mr. Chicago' is dead at 91

     When mentioning Irv Kupcinet in my column last week, I went to check his obituary, and was surprised to see that it had never been posted here, despite my occasionally sharing runs of past obits when on vacation — which I will be this entire week. 

     That he was a man from a former era goes without saying — when journalists mattered, when they wielded true power, when there was at least a tang of reality to their relationships with the famous. Bob Hope MC'ed Kup's 25th anniversary dinner; when I hit 25 years of column writing, I didn't even mention it, not wanting to draw attention to my age.

     After he died, his faithful assistant Stella told me to take what I liked from his memento-jammed office. I helped myself to a coffee cup from Kup's Show, a photo of him smoking cigars with Nixon (which, sadly, I can't put my hands on at the moment) and the above street sign, from when the Wabash Avenue bridge was named in his honor in 1986. I had it in my office for years, but when we moved from the Apparel Center to smaller quarters on Racine Avenue, I gave it away to a reader as a prize in the Saturday contests that EGD used to hold.

    This obit is long — over 2500 words, more than three times the length of a regular column. We'd never run such a long obituary of a staffer nowadays. Then again, we don't employ anyone who would merit it.

     Irv Kupcinet knew everybody before they were anybody. He knew CBS's Mike Wallace when he was still Myron Wallace, an obscure announcer on a Chicago variety show. He reported from Israel when it was still British Palestine. And when he met Marilyn Monroe, she was still a brunette.
     He even knew this newspaper before it was the Sun-Times, back when it was just the Times and had yet to have its 1948 union with the Chicago Sun.
     Mr. Kupcinet — Kup, as he was known to one and all — wrote his column so well and so long that he seemed connected to every celebrity around. Kup had the phone numbers nobody had; stars who weren't taking calls took a call from Kup.
     Kup died Monday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he was admitted Sunday with respiratory complications from pneumonia. He was 91.
     "He was the best of the best in the business," said Stella Foster, his assistant for 34 years. "There will never be another. Never."
     Kup was friendly with presidents, barbers and the top A-list of Hollywood. It wasn't a press agentish, fake kind of friendship. He stayed at their homes — at Jack Benny's, at Danny Thomas', at Joan Crawford's. When he went on vacation, Bing Crosby might pitch in to write his column, or Mike Todd, or Betty Grable. Bob Hope spoke at the 1968 dinner honoring Kup's 25th anniversary as a columnist.
     He was known for nightclubbing, but he also gave dinners, and John Wayne might show up. Or Frank Sinatra, with Ava Gardner in tow, or Cary Grant, or Clark Gable, or too many others to mention.
     But he was no relic. Kup survived the changing times, on sheer determination, hard work and good contacts. He never retired. He never slowed down except under a doctor's orders. While his health deteriorated over recent years, Kup insisted on coming in to the office to write his column, always quipping that he wanted to be "terminal at the terminal," and he nearly was. His last column ran Nov. 6.
     Nobody could match Kup. He was a Chicago institution, the link between local celebrity and international fame.
     "Irv Kupcinet was as closely identified with Chicago as the Picasso, the Hancock Building and the Sears Tower — and he was an important part of this city long before they were," said Mayor Daley. "In six decades of columns, he had thousands of scoops — and when something was in Kup's Column, you knew it was true ... Chicago won't be quite the same without him."
     His passing "marks the end of an era," said Gov. Blagojevich, who offered condolences to readers of his column along with Kup's family. Kup's Column "was the source of information for all Chicagoans," the governor said. "Kup was a part of the fabric of Chicago. With his passing, he has now joined the pantheon of Chicago legends: Harry Caray; Walter Payton; Jack Brickhouse; Mayor Richard J. Daley; Mike Royko, and Ann Landers."
     He "was a great colleague and a great friend," said John Cruickshank, Sun-Times vice president of editorial. As "Mr. Chicago," he helped solidify the reputation of the paper, which takes "enormous pride" in his career, Cruickshank said. "Kup's greatness was as a connector of the disparate communities that make up Chicago," Cruickshank said.
     Indeed, when Cruickshank and Editor in Chief Michael Cooke arrived to lead the Sun-Times, Kup welcomed them to the city, Cooke said.
     "He had a work ethic that was staggering, but he also had the good sense to have the fun that journalism can give," Cooke said.
     He was the man in Booth One at the Pump Room, chatting easily with stars making the layover on the Super Chief and the California Zephyr. (A.J. Liebling, in his classic essay on Chicago, pointed out that the stars frequently stopped in Chicago specifically to talk to Kup; otherwise, they'd take the express.)
     "He was unique because he represented an era of the gossip columnist, the sportswriter and the political columnist all rolled into one," said Ald. Bernard Stone (50th). "What I remember best was that Kup never printed a story about me where he didn't call me first and check with me to make sure it was true."
     Kup lunched with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall at the Pump Room the day after they married in 1945. Harry Truman would phone to remind him to look after his daughter, Margaret, when she was in town.
     Kup covered every Academy Awards ceremony from 1945 to 1986. He went to London for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and crashed the dress rehearsal by flashing his Chicago police press card.
     Over the years, Kup's Column was distributed to more than 100 newspapers around the world and its author showered with innumerable awards. In 1982, he was elected to Chicago's Journalism Hall of Fame. The city renamed the Wabash Avenue bridge over the Chicago River in his honor in 1986.
     His other accomplishments were enough to fill several careers. He broadcast Chicago Bears football games, with Jack Brickhouse, for 24 years. He appeared in two movies, produced by friend Otto Preminger, "Advise and Consent" and "Anatomy of a Murder."
     He appeared on television as early as 1945 and was a pioneering television talk show host — he started on CBS in 1952 with a late-night news/interview program. In 1957, he replaced Jack Paar on NBC's "America After the Dark," which eventually became "The Tonight Show." His own television program ran from 1959 to 1986, syndicated at one point to 70 stations nationwide, and featured newsmakers from Richard Nixon to Alger Hiss to Malcolm X — with whom he forged an improbable friendship.
     The show was known for its spontaneity. Carl Sandburg once walked off the set in mid-broadcast, declaring he had to "wee-wee." Radical Abbie Hoffman lit up a joint on the air and was asked by Kup to leave.
     Ann Landers shocked the audience — and Kup — when, on a show that paired her with porn star Linda Lovelace, the advice columnist described in precise detail the act Lovelace was famous for.
     The show won 15 local Emmys and the prestigious Peabody Award.
     He was a close friend of Truman, who gave Kup and his family a personal tour of the White House while he was president. Eight years out of office, when Truman finally revealed why he had fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, he gave the scoop to Kup: The general had been chafing to attack Communist China with atomic bombs.
      A sign of Kup's lasting influence was that, decades later, when Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan wanted to make a public relations gesture toward the Jewish community, he did so by having dinner with Kup.

Born in North Lawndale

     Irving Kupcinet was born July 31, 1912, in the largely Jewish North Lawndale neighborhood around 16th and Kedzie, the youngest of four children of Russian immigrants Olga and Max Kupcinet. His father drove a bakery truck. As a young boy, Kup — whose nickname then was "Bubbles" — helped his father make deliveries on a horse and wagon.
     He got his first taste of journalism at Harrison High School, where he edited the school paper, starred in the school play and was president of the senior class.
     He also played football. He was good enough to earn a football scholarship to Northwestern University. But a fistfight with the coach's brother led to his transferring to the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks.
     He played on a college all-star football team with future president Gerald Ford. Kup was the quarterback, Ford was the center, and Kup always quipped that he had an intimate view of Ford.
     On graduation, Kup was drafted in 1935 by the Philadelphia Eagles of the National Football League. A serious shoulder injury cut that rookie season short, and he returned to Chicago, landing a $32.50-a-week sportswriter's job at the Chicago Daily Times late in 1935.
     Kup had his share of fistfights in that pre-litigious age: He was in the thick of a notorious brawl that took place April 3, 1937, in the lobby of a Tampa hotel, when Kup sallied to the defense of Jack Miley of the New York Daily News, who was taking on nearly the entire St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean, goaded by his wife, laid a punch on Kup and then ran away. The story made headlines for over a year, fed by Kup challenging Dean to a fair fight with taunts such as "You yellow-bellied, hen-pecked husband, you wouldn't fight a baby."
     As the 1930s ended, Kup was ready to trade fistfights for marital harmony. Four years earlier, he had met a feisty redheaded Northwestern undergrad named Esther "Essee" Solomon. The two wed on Feb. 12, 1939, and honeymooned at spring training in Florida.
     Kup covered the Bears and became close to Bears owner and founder George Halas. Kup worked as an NFL referee — a common practice for newspapermen at the time — and he presided over the Bears' historic 73-0 demolition of the Washington Redskins in the 1940 championships.
     The practice ended, the story goes, after a game between the Bears and the Green Bay Packers. Kup was head linesman and called for a measurement to see if the Bears had made a crucial first down. When it was determined they had, Kup headed for the sidelines whooping, "We made it!"
     By the early 1940s, Kup had his own sports column. Each column ended with a short "people" section. So he was a natural to be tapped by Times editor Russ Stewart for the new column he had in mind to rival Walter Winchell's. His competition in Chicago, Nate Gross at the old Chicago's American, was known for gathering his information over the phone, from home. So Kup shrewdly decided to go where the action was and get his news, hot, direct and firsthand.
      "I'd be there. I'd be visible," Kup recalled in his autobiography. "If someone had something worth printing, they'd know where to find me -- if I wasn't already within earshot."
     Kup's column debuted Jan. 18, 1943.

Making the rounds

     Kup, often with Essee at his side, did the rounds of Chicago nightclubs during their elegant heyday. The Chez Paree. The HiHat Club. The Trade Winds. The 5100 Club, where he saw Danny Thomas when he was just starting out. He took Bob Hope, of all people, to see Lenny Bruce, who returned the favor by basing a scathing routine on Kup (Saul Bellow, too, parodied Kup, using him as a character in Humboldt's Gift: "He looked haughty, creased and sleepy, like certain oil-rich American Indians from Oklahoma," Bellow wrote).
     So identified were Kup and Essee with the Ambassador East's Pump Room that the hotel installed a full-scale replica of Booth One, the restaurant's seat of prestige, in their East Lake View apartment.
     "Being mentioned in Kup's column was more important than being mentioned anywhere else," said Stone. "Being mentioned in Kup's column was the epitome of making it and being recognized as somebody."
     The couple had two children, Jerry and Karyn, who was called "Cookie." Cookie was an aspiring actress and moved to Hollywood, where she was murdered in 1963 at the age of 22. The crime was never solved.
     Kup grieved the loss of his daughter for the rest of his life. In 1966, when the Tribune syndicate asked Kup to replace the recently deceased Hedda Hopper, dangling a "mind-boggling" offer that included Hopper's Hollywood home, Kup refused, largely because he and Essee did not want to move to what he later described as "the Hollywood that had sucked our daughter into its maelstrom."
     While Kup did not dish the dirt that other gossip columnists thrived on, he was no lightweight, either. After he pointed out that Abigail Van Buren had reprinted a 20-year-old Dorothy Dix witticism in her "Dear Abby" column, a "furious" Van Buren never spoke to him again.
     When the Chicago Bar Association refused membership to a black attorney, claiming that it was a social club and not a professional organization, Kup riposted that its "members have some adjusting to do with Uncle Sam's Internal Revenue Department" since social club dues were not tax deductible.
      "His legacy is that of a communicator of substance and a bridge builder with compassion whose life and legacy made all of us better," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was in Atlanta when he heard of Kup's death.
     "Kup built bridges between the races and facilitated a dialog when there was no way out," said Jackson, adding that one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s last interviews was on Kup's show. "He was one of the few platforms we had to engage in the broader debate of social issues such as war and peace."

Wrong turn at Vatican

     Kup could laugh at himself. In his 1988 autobiography, Kup, a Man, an Era, a City, he tells the story of how, after meeting with Pope Pius XII in 1949, he exited through the wrong door in the Vatican.
     "Suddenly, I was in a giant red velvet room filled to capacity with 1,500 people ... all of whom began to genuflect at my entrance! I realized something was askew."
      Kup was a tireless worker for charities — raising funds at the Irv Kupcinet Open celebrity golf tournament and the old Harvest Moon Festival; conducting the annual Purple Heart Cruise outings for wounded veterans for 50 years after 1945, and as the original and perennial Chicago host of the annual Cerebral Palsy telethon. The Variety Club of Chicago and Little City were favorites.
      He also raised huge sums for Israeli organizations, especially the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he established the Karyn Kupcinet International Science School. He traveled to Palestine in 1947 to report on the plight of Jewish displaced persons trying to flee the aftermath of the war. In Israel's Judean Mountains, the Irv Kupcinet Forest now grows on what was barren land before 1960.
     "Irv Kupcinet's death leaves a large tear in Chicago's social fabric," said Cardinal Francis George, Chicago's Roman Catholic leader. "Interested in everyone and always kind in his comments, he was a treasured part of our lives. May God give him rest."
      Survivors include his son, Jerry, and two grandchildren, Kari Kupcinet Kriser and David Kupcinet, and two great-grandchildren.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, November 11, 2003 

Flashback 2006: Sometimes with the heroism comes the horror

 

Northbrook Memorial Day parade, 2024

     I almost hit you with a "Happy Memorial Day." Then thought about what the holiday represents — a day to honor fallen American military men and women —  and pulled back. I'm on vacation this week, so will instead wish you a restful, reflective day. And hope that, in between the barbecues and baseball games, you think of the soldiers who gave the ultimate sacrifice so we could enjoy the freedom we still possess, despite the best efforts of the vandals who have seized our government to destroy it. 

      I have no sense of security or confidence that this freedom will last to Memorial Day 2026. But here's hoping. This ran in 2006, when the column filled a page, and I've kept the original subheadings. Three officers were reprimanded after the Haditha massacre, and of the eight Marines charged, seven had their cases dismissed; one had most of the charges against him dropped, pleaded guilty to a single count of dereliction of duty, and given a reduction in rank and a pay cut.

OPENING SHOT

     Details of the atrocity the military believes occurred last November — the murder of two dozen Iraqi men, women and children in Haditha by U.S. Marines — have been trickling out over the last few days.
     Just in time for Memorial Day; another bitter irony in an increasingly bitter war.
     Needless to say, this alarming crime will thrill our enemies, while providing grist for those who would decamp from Iraq immediately, no matter what effect our leaving might have on this unfortunate nation we have placed under our care.
     The rest of us, Americans who are proud of our country, or try to be, will be left confused, puzzled and sad. We are the good guys. Aren't we? How did Marines — the Few, the Proud — end up shooting babies?

'SUPPORT OUR TROOPS'

     "Everybody feels fear," the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Manual states. "The occurrences of war will not unfold like clockwork."
     Anyone expecting a gung-ho guide to the sweet smell of victory is in for a surprise, reading the book. Words such as "chaos," "uncertainty" "disorder" and "horror" stand out.
     I read it eight years ago, on a plane heading to California, when the Marines invited me out to Camp Pendleton to observe their amphibious invasion maneuvers. I went there laden with the standard civilian's bias against the military as a bunch of lunkheads shooting things, and came away deeply impressed, with both the intelligence and the rigor of the training, and the discipline and integrity of the men and women of the Corps.
     The Haditha massacre will be big news in the weeks and months to come, as the investigation concludes and the prosecution and punishment of those involved unfolds. It will be put to all sorts of purposes by all sorts of people.
     But we need to remember that this lone horror is not a general indictment of our country or of our military. Put hundreds of thousands of troops in a swirling, confused, murderous chaos such as Iraq, kill off 2,700 of them in endless surprise attacks sprung in the midst of often-hostile civilian populations, and this kind of breakdown is inevitable. I am not justifying it, just saying that it almost had to happen, eventually.
     Nobody joins the U.S. Marine Corps because they want to slaughter little girls in desolate desert towns. The training is designed to avoid needless brutality. That does not mean we have tamed war. It is awful, and it does awful things to people. Right or wrong, we sent our fellow citizens over there to do a job, and something bad happened to a few of them.
     "Support Our Troops" doesn't mean applaud when the sun shines and turn your face away when it rains. They were ours when they rolled into Baghdad. They are ours now, even those who are snapped and broken and shamed and facing the justice they were supposedly fighting to protect.

MEMORIAL DAY, 2006

     The old flag was torn. It had blown against a sharp section of aluminum downspout and ripped. So we took it along with us to the Friday fish dinner at the local VFW Hall and dropped it off to be respectfully burned.
     That was after last Fourth of July. Which meant that in advance of today, Memorial Day, I had to buy a new flag. I was glad for the chance. The old flag had come with our house and was small and polyester and cheap. I took the opportunity to get something bigger and better-made — 3 by 5 feet, nylon, with embroidered stars.
      I love the American flag. I find it beautiful, not only in the harmony of red and white stripes, of stars on a blue background, but for what it represents: freedom and liberty, courage and honor and justice. I see the flag, and think of Rangers climbing up a cliff at Normandy Beach into the teeth of German machine-gunners. And the Statue of Liberty. And baseball.
      I remember, after 10 days in stinking Haitian slums and dusty back roads, talking to people born under life's boot with no hope and no chance, finally catching a glimpse of that red, white and blue banner snapping on a tall flagpole in front of the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince. The heart swells in a way you never forget.
      That said, I find it odious and frightening that Congress, in one of its periodic spasms of cowardice, is contemplating an amendment to the Constitution mandating respect for the flag. The flag-burning bill passed in the House and is a toss-up in the Senate.
      As much as I love the flag, and what it represents, I also understand there are people who see that flag and think of every wrong ever committed in its name, from the slaughter of the Indians to My Lai to, apparently, Haditha. Those are also facts, as real as Normandy Beach, and while I would disagree with such a viewpoint, I can't honestly say it's unjustifiable. It's their right to think that way.
      So far. I'll tell you this. No foreign dictator ever put the fear of losing our freedom into the heart of so many Americans as Congress is doing now. If you can't burn a flag today, tomorrow you might be forced to salute it.
      This morning, I'll put out my new flag — it really glows in the sun — drag my boys away from the Xbox and march them to the front porch, where we'll put our hands over our hearts and say the Pledge of Allegiance. Not because anyone is compelling us. Because I want to; because I think it is important to teach them patriotism.
     But if the Senate passes that ban . . . well, I like to think that I'll stand in the middle of the intersection of Madison and State at high noon, hold a flaming flag over my head and go to jail to protest the erosion of our freedom. I don't know if I'd have the guts. But I do know I'd never be able to fly the flag with the same pride. I might not be able to fly it at all. Because it wouldn't mean the same thing. It would be a banner of coerced respect, of the majority, misled by their craven leaders, muzzling the shrill and discontented few among us.
     It wouldn't be my flag anymore.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     A military joke seems in order today:
     As a group of soldiers stood in formation at an Army base, the drill sergeant said, "All right! All you idiots fall out."
     As the rest of the squad wandered away, one soldier remained at attention.
     The drill instructor walked over until he was eye-to-eye with him, and then raised a single eyebrow. The soldier smiled and said, "Sure was a lot of 'em, huh, sir?"
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 29, 2006

'That's human nature'

National Museum of African-American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.

     "What makes a young, educated person from Chicago do this?" my wife said at breakfast Saturday morning, not needing to explain that the person in question is accused murderer Elias Rodriguez, and the "this" is the killing of two young Jews, Sarah Lynn Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, both Israeli embassy staffers, in front of the Jewish Museum in Washington D.C. on Wednesday night.
     "Because he's worked up over the Palestinian situation," I replied. "He's so upset about innocent people being killed that he kills innocent people. That's human nature."

No law for some is no law for all

Musee d'Orsay

  

     The Trump administration is "actively looking at suspending habeas corpus," according to Stephen Miller.
     The most important thing to understand is, if an immigrant can be snatched off the street without legal process, so can you. Because the same protection being stripped from him is also being stripped from you. Because nobody can be certain who is being bundled into that van by the masked federal police force. Because there will no longer be law to answer to. Immigrants — illegal, legal, that's just a fig leaf, for now — are the start, the test, the toe tipped into the waters of unchecked fascism. If we can't stop it now, we won't be able to stop it later.
    That's all I have to say. Enjoy the day.

AI genie out of the bottle, and that granted wish always brings trouble

     Lunch had been a handful of cashews, munched in the car on my way to Pullman to listen to sixth grade girls talk about their lives.
     Now it was 2 p.m., heading home, and glory be, a White Castle ahead on 111th Street. I pulled into the drive-thru line.
     Should I order two cheese sliders or three? I have my svelte figure to consider, so called up whatever AI helpmate crouches on my iPhone, like a troll under a bridge, and asked: How many calories in a White Castle cheese slider? Answer: 340.
     Hmm. I thought. That isn't right. The true figure had to be fewer — a McDonald's cheeseburger is about 300 — and ordered two. Which, later exploration determined, was what AI had in mind. White Castle considers a pair of sliders to be one serving. Hence the mistake. It was as if I asked AI for the price of a single shoe.
     The "this isn't right" reflex is hard to teach a computer, apparently, given the glaring wrongness artificial intelligence routinely serves up — the six-fingered hands and uncanny valley fake people who are somehow off, a little or a lot.
     That reflex should have kicked in for anyone reading the "Heat Wave" section jammed into the Sunday paper. The special section was produced by an outside vendor, King Features, and handled by the Sun-Times circulation department. Someone missed the AI-generated imaginary book titles in the summer reading list on Page 62.
     Not AI, but human failure. Someone apparently read the section's painfully generic listicles without thinking, "This is embarrassing."
     Or maybe no one read it at all. That's being investigated. Someone dropped the ball. And when trusted people don't do their jobs in newspapering, catastrophe can result, as happened here. The good name of the Chicago Sun-Times, dragged backward through the mud, coast to coast.
     Sunday I had missed the section entirely. Wrapped in the funnies, it went unseen directly to our recycling pile. Monday passed without remark.
     On Tuesday morning, Bluesky started snickering, with trolls joining hands and dancing in a gleeful circle, chanting. The Sun-Times was damned for cutbacks, damned for laying off staffers. I'm surprised nobody mentioned Wingo.

To continue reading, click here.

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