Check out Back When Books

     Monday I finally finished marching through Irwing Howe's "World of Our Fathers: The Journey of Eastern European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made." A long title but then, at 784 pages, it's a hefty book. Reading it took a while. But I was inspired to persevere, drawn through the volume, about the immigrant Jewish experience in the United States over the past century and a half, because of the wealth of detail, Howe's deft writing and relevancy, to me. It was filled with interest and poignancy, then again, it told the story of my family, more or less. And nothing spices up a work than when it reflects your own precious self.

     No sooner did I get to the end when the mail brought a new volume, "Insecure Prosperity: Small-Town Jews in Industrial America 1890-1940," by Ewa Morawska. Okay, not just for general reading, but research for a project I'm working on.

    Not your cup of tea? That's okay, and the beauty of reading. You get to curate it for your own passions and taste.  You have a different personal story, and different interests, which is why I would direct your attention to the new advertisement running along the left side of everygoddamnday.com's home page that appeared Sunday and will run for the foreseeable future.

     It is from Back When Books, an online bookstore that specializes in laser-focused titles about everything from Chicago communities — Park Ridge, Maywood, Lake Bluff, and more — to specific celebrities: Dinah Shore, Robert Young, Jack Benny. There is much old time radio, much that I would call nostalgia. And nowadays who isn't looking back to the past with fondness, if not desperate yearning? Even if that past is the Great Depression and World War II. At least then, the enemy was across the ocean. Not in the house. Not in the seat of power, destroying us from within.

     In welcoming their patronage, I'd invite you to click on their ad and take a look around. I don't charge a subscription fee, or rattle the Go Fund Me cup. But just as, at the holidays, I encourage you to patronize Eli's Cheesecake as a way to make their advertising a viable business decision as opposed to mere charity, if you are looking for some diverting reading, I'd ask that you at least give the Back When Books web site two minutes of your time and attention, and see if you can't find a volume that catches your interest. Thank you.

Fight fiercely Harvard

      The president is venting his fury — a sentence I could embroider on a pillow and use to begin every column from now until 2029, since off-gassing his bottomless magisterial displeasure is the spoon stirring our national existence, now and for the foreseeable future.
     His vendetta against Harvard University, our nation's preeminent institution of higher learning, has raged for weeks: barring it from accepting foreign students, yanking back its tax exempt status, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal support. I'm expecting the Army Corps of Engineers to fill Harvard Yard with coils of concertina wire next.

John Harvard

     My first thought was sympathy for Harvard's international students. Thousands of young people, a full quarter of the student body. Sure, many are no doubt scions of wealth, pampered and privileged and shipped off to lay the foundations for a life of same. Somebody has to pay full tuition.
     But some must have scrabbled their way there. Imagine studying in a wretched Third World slum. Hard work and smiling fate contrive to get you into Harvard, and then, while you're proudly wearing your new maroon sweatshirt around your shantytown, the president this buffoon blocks your way because ... because ... remind me, what does Trump have against Harvard?
     Oh right, they didn't bend their knee fast enough, didn't provide enough dirt on foreign-born students so he could choreograph their removal to Salvadoran El Salvadorian prisons.
     Not that I have a particular fondness for Harvard — though the boys at the Lampoon were indulgent to me when I was writing my college pranks book, allowing me the run of their library and archives. We shouldn't focus too long on one harm, because there are so many.
     The president is a whirling dervish of destruction, undermining our National Park Service here, our public health system there. It's hard to keep up.
     On Friday, he fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery for the crime of hanging pictures of Black folk. That hurt, because under her tenure, the gallery became perhaps the most vibrant wing of the Smithsonian. I love visiting it.
     This is a war on history — a literal white-washing — and all of us have a part to play, by being diligent stewards of the past.
     For instance, discussing the current assault, I told my wife: "Harvard was occupied by the British."
     What I meant was the place is very old, has been through a lot and will get through this, too.
     The very old part is true — founded in 1636, our nation's first university.
     But as often happens when you fire history from the hip, I missed. Plug "Did the British occupy Harvard?" into Google, and its AI chatbot pipes up with, "Yes, Harvard buildings were occupied by British soldiers during the American Revolutionary War. In 1775, the Provincial Congress commandeered Harvard's buildings, and they were used to house 1,600 British soldiers, according to the Harvard Gazette."
     Being a trained professional, I then read the Harvard Gazette article Google AI linked to. Which did not say that. Sixteen hundred British troops weren't housed at Harvard; it was 1,600 American troops. An important distinction.
     How can everyone keep going on about how AI will eat our lunch, take our jobs and become our overlords? It can't even read a lucid article and differentiate between the British, who occupied nearby Boston, and the colonials, who settled in Cambridge, waiting for George Washington to assemble his Continental Army.

To continue reading, click here.

Google AI learns fast. On Sunday it was this.

On Monday it was this.

The nation won't go to hell any faster if you pause to admire butterflies

 

     Let's see. On Saturday we looked at a certain president who's name long ago began to taste like vomit in our mouths, and his vigorous efforts to whitewash — quite literally — American history because ... well, I really have no idea why, exactly. Perhaps a legal way to kick people he hates without committing actual atrocities. Or maybe he feels it'll make haters like himself look better, generally, and perhaps instill a habit of casting a soft glow of nostalgic faux patriotism over the harshness of reality, an obscuring pink fog that might linger to when history finally, please God, has a chance to finally look back on our current epoch of national shame.

     So that means today we can shift to some beautiful butterflies I saw Saturday at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Because I think it's smart to alternate. Because we've got ... 44 months left in his second term, assuming the Constitution isn't entirely scrapped by then.

    Butterflies. How could I spot so many? Easy, a highly trained naturalist such as myself can induce a kind of spiritual self-hypnosis where I can look out over an expense of field and flower and just see a single butterfly, resting on a leaf 50 yards away, and sense its presence through deep spiritual bond with the natural universe ...  
     Kidding. Though I see the value of these lies — they're easy and fun too!. No, we went to "Butterflies & Blooms," the enclosed butterfly space at the Garden (writing the self-aggrandizing fabrication above, my first thought was, "Geez, how come libs don't get to just make shit up." My second was, "If the self-inflating brag you're tossing out isn't true, how stupid do you have to be to feel enhanced by saying it?")
     Sorry, butterflies. My wife's idea to go. Can't very well object to that. "No way, dear, I'm not wasting my time ... well, fuck butterflies!" 

     Not my brand. To enter the Butterflies & Blooms pavilion, you go through what is in essence an airlock, a set of double doors, with the interior door having an extra barrier of plastic strips, like in a warehouse freezer, to thwart a butterfly jailbreak. On the way out, you're checked twice, once by a staffer, then by looking in a mirror yourself, to make sure no butterflies are piggybacking on you, escaping into the greater world. It's like visiting Stateville.

Common morpho

     Having a sympathetic heart, my wife noticed a number of butterflies clinging to the mesh, as if gazing wistfully at the unfettered blue, yearning to breath free, and expressed words to that effect. I pointed out that there are plenty of hungry birds out there and, for all we know, we were projecting our love of freedom onto the butterflies. Perhaps they're thinking, "Thank God I'm safe in here!" 

    Our "love of freedom." Ah, hahahahaha. I crack myself up sometime. For a supposedly freedom loving people, we sure grabbed the boot of totalitarianism and pulled it down firmly upon our own necks. The hideous thing is ...

    Butterflies! See how hard this can be? Have we done the etymological (as opposed to the entymological) dissection of "butterfly" yet? Whence the "butter"? That's a stumper. I'm going to guess the color — those little pale yellow butterflies you see, when not in exhibits like "Butterflies & Blooms," but flitting about fields in the greater world.

     Pretty to think so. Especially compared to the theory floated by the Oxford English Dictionary, which tosses up its hands: "The reason of the name is unknown; Wedgwood points out a Du. synonym botershchijte..., which suggests that the inset was so called from the appearance of its excrement."

    Of course it does. Botershchijte. My Dutch isn't so hot, but that word looks like "butter shit" and ... indeed it is. That's perfect. Hopeful me, thinking the insect is named for its modest butter yellow denizens, when in reality the insect was named after its own shit. How au courant. Can you think of another animal named after its excrement?

     Actually, circling back to politics, which return tomorrow: "Trump's America." It does fit, and if that logic works for butterflies, then, well, why not?

White peacock

Out with the experts, in with the flunkies

 

LL Cool J, by Kehinde Wiley (National Portait Gallery)

     As a child, my favorite part of the Smithsonian was the Air & Space Museum. How could you not love all those planes? The delicate wood and fabric 1903 Wright Flyer. The indefatigable gray Ryan monoplane The Spirit of St. Louis. The orange Grumman Gulfhawk, which I had a personal fondness for because I had constructed a model of it — twirl the propeller and wheels retracted.
     But I grew up, and began to really appreciate the National Portrait Gallery. For the hall of presidents, the gorgeous August St. Gaudens bronzes. But also the way its collection strained to embrace all America. It wasn't mired in the dusty past, but alive with the vibrancy of today.
     You learned stuff at the National Portrait Gallery. The museum didn't just hang rapper LL Cool J, but juxtaposed it with John Singer Sargent's portrait of John D. Rockefeller, inviting visitors to notice how artist Kehinde Wiley, asked by VHI to paint the singer, used the oil titan's pose to convey power and authority.

William "Kyle" Carpenter by Mike McGregor

  

     The sort of "divisive narrative," apparently, that inspired our president, as part of his war on history, at least history that includes Black folk, to fire National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet on Friday, even though Sajet does not work for him and the president doesn't have the authority to do so. What cares a dictator for such niceties?
     What Donald Trump does care about — not that he ever visited the gallery nor saw the art — is the vexing display of works like Mike McGregor's photo of Lance Corporal William Carpenter, who used his body as a shield to protect his fellow Marines from an exploding grenade in Afghanistan in 2010. 
    Such a photo makes a viewer think, about many things really, including the way government policies have real effects on real people. We have no idea how the damage to the government, even of the Trump administration's first four months, will affect the people of the United States.

    And if the administration has its way, we never will.
    A thinking population, alive to he possibility of personal courage, the meaning of sacrifice for a higher ideal, would never tolerate a liar, bully, fraud and traitor like Donald Trump. So sweep away the dynamic director, whom Trump called "a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position."

    In with another fawning toady, though I imagine Fox News is running out of second string hosts by now.  No matter. There is no shortage of groveling cowards ready to betray their nation and everything it represents for a steady salary. When the concentration camps move from El Salvador to downstate Illinois, there will be no trouble hiring guards.

     Next we'll see a purge of the artworks. I'm already planning to be in Washington in July, to rendezvous with a certain young lady I'll be eager to meet. I was looking forward, should a spare moment present itself, to hurry over to the National Portrait Gallery to enjoy its riches. That visit will be tinged with melancholy, knowing that the edgier material will be heading to storage, replaced by 19th century patriotic tableaus and Rogers Groups of Lincoln consulting his generals and boys fishing.

     I assume the portrait of Trump can stay. Heck, they'll probably add more. A National Portrait Gallery filled with portraits of Donald Trump — that would be a moving musem-going experience.

Flashback 2008: Who's on first? Hillary hailed as Everest conqueror, but it was Tenzing

     When I wrote my book on failure, I wanted to consider a vast, arduous undertaking where the achievement of the goal and the non-achievement of it are very similar, very close. I knew that mountaineers had gotten within a couple hundred feet of the summit of Mount Everest and then been forced back.

    So I wrote a chapter, "Were the Mountain Smaller," about all the expeditions that DIDN'T make it to the top of Everest before Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary — in that order — first reached the mountain's zenith.

     That still eludes most people commenting on the event ("History," Napoleon supposedly said, "is a lie agreed upon.") And since it is Mount Everest climbing season, again. And we are treated to photos of mobs of climbing reaching the summit. And are reminded, again, that Edmund Hillary reached the summit on May 29, 1953. I thought I would mention, again, that he wasn't the first.

     This is from when the column filled a page, and I've retained the very spot-on complaint of a downstate reader.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     Perhaps it is the expected haziness after more than half a century. Perhaps it is the respect afforded to the newly dead. But most obituaries of New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary, 88, who joined the choir invisible Friday, ignored one salient and significant point.
     He may not have been the first man on the summit of Mt. Everest.
     Yes, the Associated Press calls him "the first person to stand atop the world's highest mountain" and credits modesty for his initial reluctance to claim he got there ahead of his climbing partner, Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay.
     "He was humble to the point that he only acknowledged being the first man atop Everest long after the death of Tenzing."
     That's one way to look at it.
     Another is that Tenzing was really the first man there, a fact initially disregarded by Hillary and his team, since Tenzing was the porter, the valet, one of countless human pack animals who had been humping crates of champagne up the side of Everest for British expeditions for decades. In their view, Tenzing couldn't be the first man atop Everest, whether he beat Hillary there or not, because he wasn't quite a man, and they were shocked when, after the ascent, the joyous Nepalese greeted Tenzing as the conqueror of Everest.
     There isn't room here to lay out the whole controversy, but suffice it to say that I believe Tenzing got there ahead of Hillary, despite Hillary's claims after his partner was safely dead. Tenzing had to be first because otherwise the Brits would never have been coy about this for so long. You could feel their frustration at this unexpected equal appearing before them, as if materializing out of the thin mountain air.

AND I DID IT ALL BY MYSELF!!!

     Who else missed the big asterisk by Edmund Hillary's name? The Washington Post missed it, as did the Los Angles Times, the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune ("the first person to reach the summit.") The Sun-Times obituary was vague, though the headline overstated the case -- "First to scale Everest" -- as headlines will do.
     Besides this column, the only paper to remember the controversy was the New York Times. Which is why, let me remind you, we need more than one newspaper.

DOWNSTATERS GRAB THEIR PITCHFORKS

     I don't print many letters because to do so seems coasting. But I knew, after tossing a sharp word like "hick" at my readers in the hinterlands, that I was then morally obligated to let them have a whack at me in print.
     This response from Ralph Moses, though a tad long, seemed the most printable, both because it wasn't mean-spirited and because he hails from the grandly named, if distant, town of Golden Eagle, Ill.

     Mr. Moses writes:

     After reading your January 9th column, The Buck Stops Here, three times to make sure I understood what you were saying, I started to write a letter to the editor about how self-centered, ill-informed, arrogant and boorish your statements were.
     But then I decided I had much more to say than could be fit into a Letter To The Editor and decided to go directly to the source.
     So, let me offer you a different perspective on a few things.
     First. Chicago is not the economic engine that drives Illinois, much less the entire Midwest. Rather, it rides on the back of those people. Let me remind you that the Chicago Board of Trade made its fame and fortune trading corn, soybeans, wheat and other grains. Likewise, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange started by trading butter and eggs, then later moved into cattle, hogs, pork bellies and other livestock. Those traders didn't even handle the products; just took a cut of the profits!
     Those same exchanges handle lots(!) of money(!) which, in turn, drives the banking system with names like Bank One and LaSalle National Bank. The brokerage firms employ thousands of runners, phone clerks, accountants and lawyers. In the past, the Stockyards used to employ thousands of immigrant workers handling the cattle, hogs and grain that came through Chicago.
     None of those people would have a job had it not been for the people in the hinterlands.
      Second. It is called the Chicago Transit Authority, not the Illinois Transit Authority! The last time I checked, the CTA didn't even cross the boundaries of Cook County! The CTA doesn't come within 300 miles of where I currently live. Why, it didn't even come within 10 miles of where I lived when I lived in Oak Lawn.
     So I ask you this. Why is your problem my responsibility? Why should the City of Chicago, with a population approaching 3 million, be looking to residents of Golden Eagle, population about 200, for a handout?
      Finally, if Chicago is indeed the economic engine of the Midwest, then it is us hicks that should be looking to Chicago for a handout!
     Now, regarding our representatives at the State Capital: Their pork barrel projects, political bickering, and other bull are things that you and I can agree on.
     So I invite you to come visit me and we can discuss the state of the State while I slop the hogs and feed the chickens. We can sit on the front porch swing, sip some cider and commiserate about the graft among aldermen at City Hall (yours and mine).

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     A joke at the expense of city slickers seems in order. Calvin Trillin wrote the following of New York and, despite his claim of uniqueness, it is also true of Chicago:
     Ask yourself why the New York subway system, alone of all the mass transit systems of the world, has maps inside rather than outside the trains. It's to force you to get on the wrong train in order to find out where you're going. You decipher the map to discover that the first step in reaching your destination is to get off the wrong train at the next stop.
         — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 13, 2008

I'll park my feathery ass wherever I please!

      "Anthropomorphize" is the five-dollar word of the day.
     I'm assuming regular readers of this blog already know what it means. But for the benefit of newcomers, who seem to arrive daily in platoons, we'll crack open the Oxford English Dictionary:
     "To attribute a human form or personality to." 
     Hmmm. Not quite a satisfying definition. I didn't consider the "form" part — if you look at the headlights and grill of a car and see a face, you are anthropomorphizing the car. 
    And "personality" seems too broad. I would define it as "ascribing human qualities to objects or animals not in possession of them." Like detecting a note of defiance in this bird parking himself where he may, the sign be damned.
    That's ridiculous, of course, because birds can't read. What I am doing is projecting my own sense of "fuck you" defiance, which you'd think would be softening after a few days of vacation — spent busily working, of course, just not at newspaper stuff. Except for the ... ah ... important obit that I recast on my first day off. Just worried that the guy would die while the older, not-so-sharp-or-good version was kneeling in the on-deck circle. You can't say, "Whoops, I was taking time off, so let the inferior obit slip by..."

     Well you can. I suppose I'm worried about being yelled at by people who left years ago. Muscle memory. Whatever works...  

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