Flashback 2006: Defeat of flag-burning ban a victory for freedom

     We couldn't stop by the Round the Clock Family Restaurant on our quick weekend trip to Ohio — two dogs in the car. But we certainly thought about it, for reasons this column makes clear.

OPENING SHOT

     With the Fourth of July a few days off, American flags have sprouted along parade routes and downtown streets. If the colors seem not quite as bright this year, the reds a little duller, the blues less true, you might be feeling the chill of the close victory that our flag, and the freedom it represents, eked out in the Senate last week, as the bill that would have allowed the banning of flag burning went down 66-34.
     One vote would have swung it the other way.
     Too close for comfort. Though no more frightening than a dozen other ways American ideals have been carelessly compromised in the name of expediency by this administration.
     Why do those who clearly doubt the ability of this country to thrive while adhering to long-established principles always insist they are the most patriotic? Perhaps because they know, deep down, they are committing an act of betrayal. That the flag is most glorious when respected — or not respected — out of free will. That this country is strongest when its laws are respected, even by those in power.

DON'T MAKE ME STOP THIS CAR!

     We left early — 7 a.m. A long weekend road trip to Cleveland. The idea was to slip out of town before rush hour and grab breakfast in the wilds of Indiana.
     About 9 a.m., a sign suggested "McDonald's," and while I normally avoid the place, the boys had been so good, why not give them a treat?
     "Who wants breakfast at McDonald's?" I enthused, bracing for shouts of glee from the back seat.
     "McDonald's makes me nauseous,'' groaned the 9-year-old.
     Not quite the "Oh boy gee whiz thanks!" I had expected.
     "You're right," I said. "McDonald's makes me nauseous, too."
     So we pulled off at LaPorte to explore. There, in the midst of five chain links — McDonald's, KFC, Subway, Taco Bell, A&W Root Beer — was one hand-painted sign: Round The Clock Family Restaurant.
     Rule No. 1 for road trips: Always choose the local place; they survive for a reason.
     We were rewarded with an experience that entered family lore, from the chatty, "Where are you folks from?" waitress to the sizzling hot pork chops (yes, I know).
     The tables sported paper placemats where local businesses advertised — Tom's Landscaping and Hugo A. Bamberth, attorney at law, and the LaPorte County Public Library. The bathrooms could be grafted on to the new El Trendo restaurant in Lincoln Park and not seem out of place: retro tile floors, slate green walls, a stainless steel sink. Immaculate. That really impressed me because most restaurant bathrooms look like the floor of the Cook County medical examiner's autopsy room after a plane crash.
     We liked the restaurant so much we decided, on the return trip home, to delay lunch two hours so we could eat there again. Qualifying us for the Early Bird Special, meaning that my BBQ ribs, mashed potatoes (don't say it — I was on vacation) and Rosa Maria soup cost $5.09.
     "This is the best restaurant!" said the 9-year-old.
     "Maybe this could be a tradition," suggested his brother.
     Maybe.

SAME LOCATION FOR 32 YEARS . . .

     "I'm a family practitioner, like your family doctor," said Hugo A. Bamberth, the lawyer on the restaurant placemat. "I do adoption to zoning — A to Z. There are always things you choose not to do  — drug cases, child molesters, things like that."
     Some lawyers take pride in the gigantic settlements they've won or the appearances before the U.S. Supreme Court they've made. Bamberth is not one of those.
     "I'm unusual in that I have been in the same address and same phone number for 32 years," he said. "I feign a yawn when I talk about my exciting legal career. To some, I suppose it has been boring. For me it has been very steady."
     I've spoken to a lot of lawyers in my day, and they tend to be circumspect — they won't tell you their favorite flavor of ice cream without considering the matter from every angle, and sometimes not even then. Bamberth isn't like that. I asked him if he gets much business from the place mats.
     "I do," he said. "Because we have Hudson Lake, Fish Lake, Pine Lake, Stone Lake, we have a lot of Chicago weekend folks that have cabins or fishing cottages or whatever and come down here regularly on weekends in the nice weather. One weekend, two of your Chicago firemen had a little too much to drink and got arrested — my recollection is they ran off the road. Nobody got hurt, but they really didn't need that. They gave me a call, and I represented them in those matters."
     Bamberth was in no hurry whatsoever, and we spoke at length in pleasant fashion. He said that LaPorte was a wonderful place to raise his two daughters — Kristen Ulery, now an assistant principal at Gemini Middle School in Niles, and Wendy Bamberth, a fifth-grade teacher in Bensenville.
     "It's just a nice small town," he said.

SPEAKING OF SMALL TOWNS

     We went to Cleveland for my parents' 50th anniversary. Hoping to add interest for the boys, I tacked on an Indians game at Jacobs Field and a day at Cedar Point, the amusement park, where I discovered that one of the joys of roller coasters is that it is impossible to be detached while riding one. Nothing eliminates critical distance or banishes cynicism like being fired at 120 m.p.h. into a 400-foot hill, as we were in the Top Thrill Dragster.
     I almost pointed out to the boys that roller coasters are a good metaphor for life in general — long spans of boredom endured for a few moments of pleasure. But I figured, they'll find out soon enough.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     Before he rang off to see to a client, Bamberth told this joke:
     During the first Gulf War, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf is walking in the Iraqi desert.
     He kicks something in the sand, bends down, and discovers it is a brass lamp, which of course he rubs. Out pops a genie.
     "I can grant you any wish you like," says the genie.
     Schwarzkopf removes a map of the Middle East from his back pocket.
     "I'd like everlasting peace throughout this region," says the general.
     "You've picked the one thing that even I cannot do," confesses the genie, with a sigh. "Could you pick a second choice?"
     "Well . . . ," says the general. "It would be nice if the Cubs could finally win a World Series."
     The genie looks stricken.
     "On second thought," he says, "let me see that map again."
                             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 2, 2006

Round The Clock Family Restaurant did indeed become a Steinberg family tradition. From 2023.

Flashback 1993: Hair-Raising Feats Give Pilot a Break - Biplane's Antics Far From 727 Grind

   

     The Chicago Air and Water Show is back. Thirty-two years ago I talked with stunt pilot Susan Dacy who, yes, will be barnstorming this weekend in her Super Stearman 'Big Red." 

     So what is the difference between piloting an open biplane that goes 100 miles an hour and can do barrel rolls and outside loops, and a Boeing 727 that goes 500 miles an hour and, ideally, never does any rolls or loops at all?
     First, with a biplane, every day is a bad-hair day.
     "It's a write-off when I wear my helmet," says Susan Dacy, who pilots both a 727, in her day job as a pilot for American Airlines, and a Great Lakes biplane, which she flies acrobatically at air shows such as the one in Chicago this weekend.
     This is Dacy's third year flying at air shows, which she does in the summer as a break from flying the big airliners.
     The two types of planes really couldn't be more different. Dacy's Great Lakes biplane - a replica built in the 1970s and based on classic barnstorming planes — burns 10 gallons of gasoline an hour. The 727 burns 9,000 pounds of gas an hour, or about 1,280 gallons.
     As terse and no-nonsense as airline pilots are supposed to be, Dacy, 35, is not one to ramble on and on about the joys of flying and the lures that drew a girl from Harvard, Ill., to become one of the country's still-rare female pilots.
      "There are getting to be a few more pilots out there, and people are starting to notice," said Dacy, checking out her biplane at Meigs Field before the start of the shows, which end Sunday..
     But then, in her case, the reason for her career choice is obvious: she grew up on an airport — the private airport at Harvard, owned by her parents. If she ever wanted to do anything else but fly, she can't remember it.
     By age 16 she had soloed in a Piper Cub, and by 18 she had rebuilt a Stearman biplane from the ground up.
     She received an aviation degree from Southern Illinois University along with an Airframe & Powerplant Mechanics license. Since then, she has logged nearly 13,000 flight hours — more than 540 solid days in the air — and flown more than 60 different types of airplanes. She says she loves to perform at air shows.
      "The most exciting thing is seeing the crowds, getting a positive response from them," she said. "Dealing with the kids is a lot of fun. Really fun to see the excitement."
     Dacy sees herself as a good role model for children.
     "I want to portray a positive image and basically get across to anyone that no matter what you want to do, if you try hard enough, you can pursue it," she said.
                — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 23, 1993

     One odd aspect of this piece is that while reporting it, I flew with Susan Dacy. We did barrel rolls and loop-de-loops over the lake. Yet I wasn't a columnist, and none of that entered into my story about her, which was either supreme self-control on my part, or lamentable negligence.

Flashback 2008: Russia too big to ignore — Best beware as world's largest nation turns away from democracy

     Vladimir Putin, the Butcher of Moscow, popped across the Bering Strait to ruff the hair of his lapdog, Donald Trump, who talked big, as always, prior to the meeting, but can be relied upon to give up the ranch when actually in the presence of his master.
    Wondering what I've written about Putin over the past, I noticed this warning to readers against ignoring Russia just because they've descended into chaos. But ignore them we did, and now they own us. Or, more precisely, our president. This is back when the column filled a page, and I've kept in the original subheads.

OPENING SHOT ...

     Quick geography quiz: What is the largest country on earth? In land area, I mean. Think hard. Imagine the "Jeopardy!" music playing. . . .
     Give up? Of course you do. Nobody knows these things anymore. It's Russia -- even after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the loss of various republics, it's still enormous, the largest nation on earth, almost as big as the United States and China combined.
     So why is it that Americans are utterly indifferent to Russia -- except, I suppose, for the growing number who actually hail from there? We don't care that Russia, having briefly flirted with democracy, is steadily sliding back toward Stalinesque dictatorship, first under former KGB man Vladimir Putin and now with his cipher puppet replacement, president Dmitry Medvedev.
     Maybe we're indifferent because we spent such a long time terrified of Soviet nukes and felt such relief now that the threat is gone (at least the direct threat. The real possibility of those weapons being passed on to third parties remains, too dire to contemplate, apparently).
     Maybe we don't care because Russia is so economically crippled (Have you ever purchased a product made in Russia? A product more complex than vodka, I mean). We don't feel threatened the way we do by China or India. We're glad the place has become one knot of organized crime funneling the nation's wealth to kleptocrats.
     That's too bad. Because -- as the Islamic world has shown us -- it's the places that we allow to fall off our radar that come back when we least expect them to bite us in the ass.

A HOMEMADE SPOON IN HIS BOOT

     Alexander Solzhenitsyn died last Sunday, and his passing made me want to re-read his work, which I hadn't looked at since I was in high school. But I was busy, and Solzhenitsyn is not a ball of fun, so I let a few days slip by before heading over to the Northbrook Public Library.
     At that point I almost didn't bother, because I figured my fellow citizens, moved by the same impulse and not dallying, would have by then stripped the shelves clean of the great Nobel Prize winner's work.
     Naive. One copy of The Gulag Archipelago was checked out, but Cancer Ward, August 1914 and a dozen others were on the shelves. I grabbed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, an early, accessible work, and loped on home to read it.
     It was as I remembered, a bleak, heartbreaking tale of life in the Russian labor camps, where Solzhenitsyn, then a soldier, was sent in 1945 for making a joke about Stalin in a letter home. It tells the story of an average day, after eight years in captivity, of Shuhkov, the nickname for Ivan Denisovich (like any Russian novel, each character has several names, just to make it more confusing). It is 16 below zero, and most of the day is spent bricklaying.
     The book is a quick read that any literate person can polish off in four hours and should, as a reminder of the 2 million -- or 5 million, or 15 million, nobody really knows -- Soviets who died during the 75 years of Communist misrule.
     Thinking about the regime's institutionalized crimes — and those of Communist China, Nazi Germany and all the other oppressive systems — clicked a tumbler into place and helped me understand why I bristle, slightly, whenever somebody gripes about America's crimes, from Guantanamo Bay to the World War II internment of Japanese American citizens to the Palmer Raids. It isn't that these things aren't stains on our history. But compared with the horrors inflicted on millions elsewhere, they're causes of pride in their isolated quality and limited scope.

ON SECOND THOUGHT . . .

     Or am I giving the United States too much of a break? After I wrote the above, I noticed I had omitted slavery and the extermination of the Indians, which though lodged in the remote of the 19th century, were also large-scale horrors. Is this evidence of the screening quality people use to ignore facts that undermine their permanent opinions? It's easy to see in others; not so easy to see in yourself.

SAUNA! FREEZER! SAUNA! FREEZER!

     Is the Thompson Center too hot or too cold? I raised the issue Friday, figuring I would hear from occupants. I did, and the answer is, "Yes."
     "I work there," wrote a friend. "It's a friggin' meatlocker."
     "It's kinda toasty," said a 20-year state employee, who naturally didn't want his name used. "In the summer it's like a greenhouse."
     "I spent two years in the office of communication," writes a reader, whose name I shall shield. "Perhaps it was the chill of thought control from the propagandists in the Gov's office on the 16th floor, but many of our offices were freezing several stories below. I wore heavy warm sweaters during the summer months. But other offices were sweltering, particularly where the sun shone."
     The rumor is that it was inferior glass that caused the initial problems.
     "The design was right, but when the Thompson Center was first built, we had such massive cost overruns, they changed the glass specs," said the long-time employee. "It was supposed to be heavy duty glass to account for the greenhouse effect, but it was over so much, they didn't use it. They'll never fix it."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE ...

     Generally I avoid sexist jokes — I found myself agreeing with a bumper sticker that read, "I'll be a post-feminist in the post-patriarchy." But this one works too well to ignore, and I think we can get away with it.
     In the Garden of Eden, in that brief, happy period before the Fall, the first man and the God who created him would sometimes converse.
     "Why did you make Woman so beautiful?" Adam asked.
     "So you would love her," God answered.
     He thought about that a while.
     "Then why did you have to make her so dumb?" Adam wondered.
     "So she would love you."
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 10, 2008

The age old question

 

Manipulated image.

      What if it's not about immigration? Not about borders. Or citizenship. Not crime. Or culture.
       It certainly doesn't feel that way.
      What if it's really about creating a faceless para-military force that follows no law, and is accountable to no one, except one man. Maybe it's about building remote internment camps that exist outside of the law, where anything can happen and does. 
     What if immigration enforcement is the dry run? To see what the public will accept. And despite a low level hum of outcry, America seems like it will accept a lot. Will tolerate this state of affairs. Allowing people — immigrants now, supposedly, but who knows who later? — to be plucked off the street, for no particular reason, by masked agents of the government, and delivered to an unknown fate. Disappeared. No record of who they were or where they went. 

      What if it's about putting the United States military into American streets and cities, ready to quell the unrest sure to be sparked by undemocratic and illegal policies?  Waiting for the next imaginary "emergency" to be declared, where temporary emergency measures can be put in place, laws and rights further suspended, only to become permanent realities.
     That feels ... I almost said "right," though it is not right. Not at all. But wrong. Very wrong.  
     What I mean is that feels ... like a more accurate assessment of what is going on right now, right before or eyes. Or, more precisely, right behind our backs. History will wonder how Americans allowed it. That's what history always wonders. Why didn't we do more to stop it, while we still could? Why didn't we see it coming? The age old question.

    Maybe because seeing what's coming is so terrifying. It's easier to pretend it's not happening. Even though it clearly is. 

Next they'll be writing the editorials

     The classic illustration of the Yiddish word chutzpah is the youth who murders his parents and then begs the court for mercy because he is an orphan.
     But now that chestnut has strong competition, with the Trump administration's director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, arguing in Tuesday's Washington Post that scrapping mRNA vaccine development is not calamitous groveling before our anti-science ruler, but "a necessary pivot in how we steward public health innovations in vaccines."
      Why? Because despite showing "promise," the mRNA platform "has failed a crucial test: earning public trust."

     And exactly why, we may ask — God knows Bhattacharya never will — has trust in such an established lifesaving technology been reduced to rubble? Oh right, anti-medicine Trump slashing away at scientific research, backstopped by his wack job secretary of health and vaccine removal, RFK Jr.
      Give Bhattacharya credit. He said it with a straight face. That must be hard. 

     Also in Tuesday's Post, former Fox New host and current U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, our old friend, Judge Box o' Wine, Jeanine Pirro, writing about "The Fight to Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful," which seems to involve the lock-'em-up tough guy swagger that represents the entirety of the Trump administration's approach to crime. Or at least toward people of color, and in their mind, to stretch the term, the two are synonymous. 

    Well, that and calling out the National Guard.

    Plus, not to forget — and how quickly we do so — masked policemen plucking people from the street and dispatching them to foreign hellholes without any sort of due process of law.

    Newspapers sometimes hand their greatly-muted microphones to public officials. The Sun-Times would let the mayor — or rather, the mayor's press office — go on about something. But two Trump stooges in one day...

     It's scary to see this pair of lapdogs being given such prime real estate in what was once a legitimate newspaper, and now clearly is slinking toward being some kind of official government house organ, like Pravda. It would almost be funny if it were not so, you know, terrifying and tragic.

Bee expert judges honey

Dushanbe Tea House

      What is the word for when you talk about something and then it occurs? Coincidence? That sounds so technical. Karma? Closer. How about serendipity? That could be it.
       My brother and I were having dinner the Dushanbe Tea House in Boulder Sunday night, on what I'm thinking of our Goodbye Ma Tour of my parents' former home. The goal being to commemorate our mother's passage into the great beyond by going on great Colorado hikes, eating at restaurants she liked, and hanging out together.
      We were recounting things she used to say. 
      "You'll find it when you're not looking for it," is the first snippet my brother served up. Advice that I remember deeply resenting as a child, ripping the house apart, looking for some toy that I wanted now.
      There were a few others: "Call people up. You can't wait for them to call you because they never will." (We are people who like to talk, and, umm, let's say our friends and acquaintances are not queuing up to be on the other end of that phone line, listening to us go on and on).
      The very next morning, I logged into Facebook to check the Memories — I do that every day, as sometimes it offers up blog posts I want to share, for the benefit of all the readers who are new to the party. Monday provided a solid pair — "We're doomed, but that's no reason to get upset," a funny-yet-dire assessment of global warming from four years ago, and "Trump surges in the polls, again," a grim recognition that, vile as Donald Trump is, "the man will be president," not despite his numerous personal flaws, but because of them. It gives me a certain cold comfort in these grim days, watching through latticed fingers as our democracy is murdered, to realize I did what I could. 
     I was racing toward the bottom of the Memories list, feeling I'd already harvested enough, when there it was. A photo I'd been searching for the other day. I was writing about honey, and remembered a shot I'd taken at the Illinois State Fair in 2012. Platforms weren't quite as synched a dozen years ago, and I was down in Springfield. I popped it up on Facebook, but it somehow never found its way into my photos. 
     I'd really liked that picture — the lighting — and it bothered me that it had blown away in the data whirlwind. Now I found it, when I wasn't looking for it, labeled "Bee expert judges honey." I probably have his name in a notebook somewhere. I might find it, or, more likely, it might be gone forever. That happens to everything, eventually. 

Flashback 2006: Da Bears Redux

     The Bears and the Dolphins tied on Sunday? 24-24 at their pre-season opener at Soldier Field? Is that possible? What happened to overtime? Is it because it's a pre-season game, and thus doesn't really matter? Overtime would just be a waste — as it is, the best players don't bother playing.

      But I can't be sure. I am not a Bears fan. Or a football fan. Though sometimes I do try to fake it, just trying to momentarily fit in. That never works.

     At first I tried deception.
     "Did you watch the Bears game?" I said, as if I had, to Charlie, the fireman who runs a coffee shop at the train station in the old leafy suburban paradise.
     "Unbelievable," said the guy in line behind me, as Charlie launched into an elaborate celebration of the offense, or the defense, or the passing game, or some such football-related thing, with such open-faced enthusiasm and sincere gusto that I was shamed into telling the truth.

     "Actually, I didn't watch it," I mumbled, accepting my Sun-Times and my coffee. "Never considered watching it."
     Sports are the universal adhesive, the commonality we all agree upon. All day Tuesday I found myself passing through pockets of shared delight, like a blind man tapping my way through a circus. Records broken, Olympian Heights scaled, the Bears, down 20 to nothing at halftime, rallying to win 24 to 23, to preserve their unbeaten record, a staggering 6 and 0. Bears, Bears, Bears.
     "Didja watch the game!" a fellow reporter called to me across the newsroom.
     "Umm . . . no," I whispered. His face fell.
      "Aren't you a Bears fan?" he asked, in a tone of focused concern, the way you'd ask a child found lost and crying in the street, "Where's your mommy?"
     "No," I said.
     He must have thought I didn't understand the question.
     "Aren't you a sports fan?"
     "No," I said. "To me, sports are the same thing happening over and over again."
     "Oh," he said, wandering off, his mouth doing an odd grimace, as if trying to dislodge something caught between his teeth with his tongue.
      I hate doing that to people. But what choice have I? False enthusiasm? It's a little late. And I couldn't pull it off anyway. "Those Bears fellows sure are thriving!" They'd stone me.
     The Bears are going to keep winning. I know it. They'll go to the Super Bowl, sucking all the air out of the city for the next three months. Chicago will be one unified city, young and old, rich and poor, black and white and yellow and brown, all united in one giddy, hugging shouting mass of commonality. Bears Bears Bears Bears.
      Except for me and, perhaps, you, and a handful of other weirdos and oddballs. I thought it necessary to set out this space for us as a Bears-free zone (if the mayor can have his security bubbles, I can have mine). God knows you'll get enough Bears everywhere else you look.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 18, 2006