Bear down, Arlington Heights Bears!

     In my post about going back-and-forth with CNN, I quote myself saying this, as a preface to explaining why the city needs every warm body it can get:
     "Chicago had 3 million residents in 1950. Now we have 2.7 million residents."
     I wasn't thinking, or, rather, thought I was writing to somebody in Atlanta. But my writing about it expanded the audience. Slapdown came quickly, from a reader named Nate.
     "'Chicago had 3 million* residents in 1950. Now we have 2.7 million,'" he wrote, quoting me. "And you're one of the ones that left. Taking the 'we' out of it."
     Ouch. True enough. I try to admit when I'm caught in a deception.
     "I generally try not to include myself among Chicagoans — stolen valor — but sometimes I mess up," I replied. "I'll correct."
     And I did, changing it to "Now Chicago has 2.7 million residents."
     Only then I realized I hadn't written that for the post, but was quoting something that I had already written to CNN. So I changed it back — as a value, quoting accurately, even quoting myself, surpasses not being caught putting on airs.

Designed by ChatGPT

    Which came to mind Monday when the Bears announced they're really, truly moving to Arlington Heights. No foolin' around this time. 
     “Moving outside of the city of Chicago is not a decision we reached easily,” Bears president and CEO Kevin Warren wrote in a letter to season ticket holders. “This project does not represent us leaving, it represents us expanding.”
     Expanding ... into Arlington Heights. While indeed leaving Chicago, in the sense they won't play there anymore. But they still won't be the Arlington Heights Bears, correct? The name "Chicago" they intend to keep, apparently.
    Allow me to savor this moment.
    As someone who has had my chops busted for 25 years for not living in the city, I'm not sure how to feel about this apparent development. Is this helpful to my cause? With this move, I've got the Chicago Bears behind me, arms folded across their chests, hands tucked in armpits, nodding in agreement. I can reply: "It's good enough for the Chicago Bears, it's good enough for me, so shut the fuck up!"
     Or is it just harmful to them without necessarily benefiting us scorned suburbanites? Chicagoans love lording their residency over those whose pillows rest over the city limits. If the Bears go on some White Sox-like swoon, will the general weakness and inauthenticity of the suburbs be blamed? 

     Bank on it.
     Unless it doesn't. The New York Giants play in East Rutherford, New Jersey. I almost said, "And nobody holds that against them." Honestly, I'm not that well versed in New York Giants fandom. Maybe their fans howl location-based derision from the stands. Maybe they wave signs, "You made me schlep to East Rutherford for THIS?!?!?!"

    Or maybe, because the Giants went to the Super Bowl five times and won four, they could play at the American Girl store in Montclair and that would be okay with fans.

     I shouldn't dip my toe too far into sports — I couldn't name a current Bears player if you put a gun to my head. But next time someone gives me grief about living in Northbrook, I can say, "Hey, at least I sometimes work in Chicago. That's more than" — whoever the quarterback of the Bears might be — "can say." 

     Which means I'll have to learn a player's name. Someday. 

* Actually, as my sharp-eyed readers pointed out, the population was 3.6 million in 1950. Which really distances me from a city known, not for its understatement, but its ballyhoo.

At least the Washington Monument is safe.

Patrick Ahern, left, talks with National Guardsmen about the Washington DC situation.

     WASHINGTON — The Washington Monument is secure. All 555 feet of it, 91,000 tons of stone with a cap of cast aluminum, a precious metal at the time the memorial was completed in 1884.
     It's safe from enemies foreign and domestic, due to its imperviousness and, for nearly a month, the diligence of National Guard members from seven states, including the trio from the Louisiana National Guard I came upon getting an earful from an older gent.
     "You are not authorized to make arrests," D.C. resident Patrick Ahern was telling them as I walked up.
     I identified myself — a Chicago newspaper columnist here studying the high cuteness levels of 3-month-old granddaughters, taking a quick busman's holiday to check out the troop situation on the National Mall.
     "These guys are not needed, and I doubt they would help Chicago much," Ahern said.
     No doubt. Though, I observed, most people I spoke with said they feel safer with soldiers around.
     "They're obviously tourists scared s---less of Washington because they read a lot of false narratives, including that which comes out of the White House," Ahern said.
     Also true. For instance, Margaret and Leonard Haight of Nebraska hadn't seen any soldiers during their visit — only 2,000 or so are spread over 68 square miles of the district.
     "I thought that we might," Margaret Haight said, seeming disappointed. I observed that some visitors find it comforting just knowing they are there, somewhere.
     "I do, too," she said.
     When Ahern walked off, one soldier said of the military presence, "Everybody has their opinion. They're free to voice. I just let them vent and say whatever they have to say."
     Smart policy. The nine guardsmen I spoke with were polite young men, not bristling with observations about their mission. Though they did clear up something I'd wondered about — why always groups of three?
     I assumed it must offer some kind of tactical advantage, and it does — called a "fire team," trios allow one soldier to focus on what's ahead, one to cover the rear and one to keep an eye on their flank.
     Soldiers have yet to arrive in Chicago, and there is hope President Donald Trump has shifted from empty threats into the braggadocio portion of the program, without actually acting. Bullies are cowards, so maybe Gov. JB Pritzker standing up to him worked.
     Trump did send out that crazed "Chipocalypse Now" meme Saturday, showing himself cosplaying Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, the Robert Duvall character in "Apocalypse Now," with the line, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning … Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR."

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Flashback 2006: Tokyo Rose, all over again

     My cousin Harry Roberts died of complications from kidney failure last week. You might remember me writing about his struggles. I will certainly be remembering him in the future — it's too soon now — but his loss got me thinking of what I've written about the illness over the years, and I found this. It ran back when the column filled a page, and I've kept the original headings, and the closing joke. Vasilios Gaitanos received a kidney transplant from his wife in 2007 and lived to 2021.

     The opening section refers to arrests that were being made of Muslim immigrants somehow implicated in the 9/11 plot and shipped to Guantanamo Bay, tortured, and kept there for years, often without any formal criminal charges, a dynamic we're repeating today.

OPENING SHOT

     Mastering the details is what makes you feel at home in a new place. When I moved to East Lake View, it was a sign I was settling in to learn that those distant pops heard Sunday mornings were the Lincoln Park Gun Club blasting away at clay pigeons. Or that the guy walking the black lab was William Kennedy Smith.

     Or that the little old lady running the Japanese general store on Belmont Avenue was Iva Toguri D'Aquino, the notorious Tokyo Rose, whose broadcasts from Japan during World War II were intended to undermine U.S. troop morale.
     A slight thrill to know that the woman selling you rice crackers was convicted as a traitor and served time in prison.
     That she was really innocent was a deeper secret — I didn't know; I bet most Chicagoans didn't know, not until they read her obituary last week. She was swept up in circumstances, trapped in Japan when the war broke out — an American citizen, born on the Fourth of July, surviving the war by working at a radio station. There was no one "Tokyo Rose," but a string of female broadcasters, and nobody proved that D'Aquino was one of them. But she was convicted anyway during the security hysteria of the late 1940s and sent to prison for six years.
     Six years.
     Her story would be trivia if it did not echo today. If there were not thousands of new Iva Toguri D'Aquinos rotting in prisons because they, too, were swept up by circumstances at a time, like the postwar period, when fear overwhelms our devotion to our most cherished ideals. If we were not willing to do vile things to protect ourselves, willing to throw innocent people into prison for years until they are eventually released, accused of nothing, convicted of nothing.
      It is a legacy that will plague our children. They will wonder how we could have allowed this. We'll claim that we didn't know. But we do know. D'Aquino, once convicted a traitor, in death performs a great service to our country by reminding us. If only we will listen.

WE'VE ALL GOT A SPARE

     Vasilios Gaitanos and his wife, Dimitra, show up on the 10th floor for their appointment, as instructed, to check in with the guard. Usually I'd have them sent down to the ninth floor, but Vasily is older, and ill, and hurrying up to greet them seems the thing to do.
      I'm rewarded by watching Vasily guide his wife downstairs, to my office. A gentle touch. A whispered "ena, thio, tria" -- "one two three," in Greek — as they reach the bottom of the escalator.
      She is blind — blinded in a car crash 11 years ago. But they are not here about her. They are here about him. Vasilios Gaitanos' kidneys are failing. He has been on dialysis for three years.
     He used to play piano in the old Denny's Den, if you remember the sprawling Greek restaurant and club on Broadway. He doesn't play much anymore.
      "Now I'm looking out for only health," he says.
      Vasily, 61, has beaten cancer three times. He has just passed the two-year cancer-free period required before he can be put on the waiting list for donor kidneys.
     Dialysis is a stopgap — I didn't realize that before meeting him. It only approximates the miracle of the kidneys, only imperfectly filters the poisons that build up in your blood. So while on dialysis, your systems breaks down — particularly your heart, and Vasily already has had heart valve trouble.
      The average wait for a new kidney in Illinois is five years. Without a kidney, Vasily will probably die before then.
      The couple are in my office because their friends think — hope, pray — that maybe, if I write about him, then somebody would step forward and give Vasily a kidney.
     This is not in keeping with my understanding of how people operate though, I admit, that if you were going to donate a kidney to a stranger, then Vasily is the sort of man you want to donate your kidney to.
      "He's a very likeable man," says cardiologist and long-time friend, Dr. Maria Balkoura. "Everybody in the Greek community knows him and loves him."
      How likeable? I held my breath when I asked him his blood type, and was relieved to hear it is O+, because I'm A+, and I was worried, watching him dote on his wife, that I'd end up giving him my own kidney.
     I can see how it would be tempting. A person only needs one kidney to get by, and giving one to Vasily might give him another 20 or 30 years instead of two or three.
      Watching him tenderly squire his wife out of my office — did I mention that he is also losing vision from the dialysis? — I realized that such an act would not save just one life, but two.

MIRACLES DO HAPPEN

     Kidney ailments are complex, and rather than rely on Vasilios' understanding of the subject, I thought it prudent to also speak with Dr. Susan Hou, chief of the renal transplant program at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood.
      She said that Loyola's waiting list has 594 people on it, that 12,000 kidneys become available each year, nationwide, while 65,000 people need them. Dying while waiting for a kidney is all too common.
     We spoke for a long time, about the dynamics of the waiting list — children under 11 get preference. We spoke about the logistics of kidney transplants — the hardy little organs are good for up to 24 hours outside of the body.
     I was almost off the phone when I thought to ask her: level with me — does Vasily have a chance? Do people ever donate their kidneys to strangers?
     "There are some amazing stories," she said. "One woman mentioned it to a neighbor at a block party, and that neighbor gave her a kidney. Sometimes a stranger will call and want to give a kidney to anyone who needs it."
     Really? I asked, incredulous. People are really that generous?
      "I've given my kidney to somebody I didn't know," she said, as matter-of-fact as can be.
      It was three years ago. A patient of hers needed a kidney. Dr. Hou thought she might be a match, and she was. So miracles of kindness do occur. Maybe one will occur for Vasilios Gaitanos and his wife Dimitra. I sure hope so.

Today's chuckle

     This sharp line, from Kathleen Norris, is quoted in Only Joking by Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves:
     In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 1, 2006

Great moments in communication

 

   

     Anxious, or just methodical? Who can say?
     Either way, I always check the Metra schedule when I'm taking the train downtown, even when I'm sure which train I'm taking. Because you never know. There might be developments, complications. Such as the announcement above.
     "Out of service"? That can't be good.
      My first thought was, "That's a relief, because I'm going downtown." So I'm good.
      My second thought was," But what about coming back? Is the entire platform "out of service?'        

       What does that mean, anyway? That the train, coming from downtown, won't stop at Northbrook? Not a huge deal. I can get off at Lake Cook Road and my wife can pick me up. Heck, I once walked back from Lake Cook Road, though it's a hike.
      I thought of calling Metra PR, seeking clarification. But they aren't a font of information either. And they're the organization who penned the above, not realizing that, whenever you write something, you need to think about your audience. What questions they might have. Such as: can I get off the train going outbound at Northbrook?
      My plan was, going in, to eyeball the situation. Which became plain as soon as I got there, and was directed — by a fairly clear canned announcement —to Platform 1, the Outbound platform. Not only wasn't it "out of service," but it was the only platform in service. A parade of odd track repair vehicles — truly, a parade, one after the other, tooting their horns as if in celebration — were going up and down the inbound track. The train, needless to say, was late, but I, nothing if not a savvy Metra traveller, had worked in an extra hour to consider just that eventuality.
      Bottom line, I got downtown and hosted our boat tour. But I hitched a ride back.

Flashback 1994: CHA VACANCIES CREATE TROUBLE SPOTS

 

The last remaining building of the Robert Taylor Homes (Wikimedia Commons)

     Wednesday's column prompted several readers to sneer at me for residing in the relative safety of Northbrook, as if living in a nice place were something to be ashamed of. But my job has taken me to every corner of the city, sometimes at night, and I go because a) it's my job; and b) I know that peril is a calculation, danger = (location x time) — you can go to the most crime-ridden spot in the city in relative safety, depending on how long you spend there. Or as I often say: if people can live there, I can visit.
     I'm writing a column that refers to this article, over 30 years old, that involved me visiting public housing projects at night. I thought I'd post it here so I can link to it. Maudlyne Ihejirika shared a byline on it with me.

    What I remember most from this story is that the mother of the boy who picked up a melted large soda bottle and showed us how it had been transformed into a crack pipe, after publication called the paper, indignantly insisting that the teen was somehow coached by us — I was with photographer Bob Davis. As if either of us would have known, or thought to do that in a million years. 

    Remember: in 1994 Chicago registered 928 homicides, almost twice the figure of recent years.

     Jenny Hodges up and left for Memphis. About a month ago. Took her kids and fled apartment 1310, on the 13th floor of the Rockwell Gardens high-rise at 2514 W. Van Buren. She wanted a better life.
     Fine for her, says her neighbor, Gloria Lumpkins, who lives next door, in 1308, with her sister and their seven children. But Hodges' former apartment is vacant now — stripped, trashed, its door wide open, one of seven vacant apartments out of 11 on Lumpkins' floor.
     "Nobody's in there but gang-bangers," says Lumpkins, 26. "They bust out the windows, throw things out the windows, use binoculars to shoot at people. There's lots of crime in here now because of vacant apartments."
     Nearly one of every six CHA apartments is vacant – 6,184 of the CHA's 40,210 units citywide, now havens for crimes such as the murder of Eric Morris, 5, last Thursday. At Henry Horner homes, entire buildings are vacant. The top eight floors at 1847 W. Washington are sealed off.
     "A lot of stuff used to happen up there — rapes and stuff," says Charlean Brown, 19.
     "It's sealed off, but you can get in," says Johnny Brown, 22.
     To show how accessible the apartments are, a trio of teenage boys – Michael Matthews, 15, Corey Bennett, 15, and Tony Dawson, 14 - go up to a vacant eighth-floor apartment at 1920 W. Washington.
     "It's messed up inside," says Michael. "They smoke crack in here."
     Broken glass is scattered around, along with beer bottles, blankets and an old foam mattress.
     "See that," Corey says, picking up a plastic rubbing alcohol bottle and explaining how a certain addict uses it to smoke crack. "He uses this to push the drugs down," he says, holding the bottle like a pipe and jamming down imaginary drugs with a nail tamper.
     "They put crack inside cigarettes," says Michael, who adds that the boys know because they've watched the addict through the open door. "He saw us looking, got mad, and threw stuff."
     "We'll be playing in the hallways; he'll be smoking his pipe," says Corey.
     Even those vacant apartments remaining empty add to the fear of residents in CHA developments.
     "You don't know what it's like. You never know what might come out at you from those apartments," says Jan Murray of 3833 S. Langley in Ida B. Wells, where Eric Morris died last week. "You call and call CHA, and it takes forever for them to come out."
     "If we don't make sure they board them up, they don't board them up," says Arthur Covington, 17.
     Many CHA residents complain about the need those apartments could be filling.
     "People want to get in and live in them and they can't get in," says Mike Hanson, 22.
     "People need these apartments," says Kenny Harper, 33. "They could get them together, looking good, but they don't."
     Officials are trying. Calling vacancies a major boon to gangs, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development allocated $10 million this summer for the CHA to reduce vacancies in Robert Taylor and Stateway Gardens, after a rash of shootings.
     Last month, the federal government granted a record $30 million to fix up about a quarter of the CHA's vacant apartments.
     "Until we get the money to tear down these high-rises, there are always going to be tragic cases like this," CHA Chairman Vincent Lane said, referring to Eric's death. "We board up those units and they tear them right back down."
     A history of work orders for the board-up of Apt. 1405, a vacant unit in a 14-story building at Ida B. Wells, illustrates the agency's losing battle.
     A CHA crew had just been out to board up the apartment — again – hours before two youths allegedly broke in and threw Morris out of a window.
     CHA's dilemma is no comfort for residents of buildings with vacancies.
     There are accidents. A 5-year-old boy wandered into a vacant unit in Rockwell Gardens last June and fell 13 stories from a window to his death.
     There are rapes. A 23-year-old man was charged in 1991 with 10 rapes in the ABLA neighborhood, five of them in vacant units in the development.
     Gangs use them. Seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was killed in Cabrini-Green in 1992 by a reputed gang member shooting at rivals from a vacant unit.
      Not every building has a problem with vacancy. At 1900 W. Washington, a strong sense of community has kept the apartments occupied.
     "This building is full," said Angela Doles, 22, who credits building president Della Walker with keeping people involved. "If you join your building group and participate you keep your building going."
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 17, 1994

Soldiers in our streets — as the city braces, remember: they're been here before

The National Guard patrols Madison Street during the riots following the assassination of 
Martin Luther King Jr. (Sun-Times archive)

 

     Chicago began with soldiers.
     Capt. John Whistler, to be precise, an Irishman who fought with the British during the Revolutionary War. After the peace, he joined the United States Army and was sent to the western frontier, which at the time was Indiana.
     There he helped build Fort Wayne. In the summer of 1803, he and his company of the 1st United States Infantry were dispatched to build a new fort at the mouth of the Chicago River, named after Thomas Jefferson's secretary of war, Henry Dearborn.
     A small settlement grew around the stockade. Then, on Aug. 15, 1812 the garrison's 66 soldiers tried to evacuate Fort Dearborn, joined by 15 friendly Miami, plus nine women and 18 children. They ran into an ambush of 500 Potawatomi warriors. Two-thirds were killed.
     That first military effort in Chicago — for years called the Fort Dearborn Massacre, but really a battle, a minor skirmish in the War of 1812 that went very badly for one side — was a mixed bag. The Army's presence planted the seeds of the city. They also got its residents killed by mishandling relations with the local Native Americans.

     The history of American soldiers in Chicago — about to get a significant new chapter with President Donald Trump planning to deploy the National Guard to the city — is also checkered.
     At times, soldiers provide a welcome, calming presence, such as during the 1919 race riots, when they created a buffer between Chicagoans bent on murdering each other because of the color of their skin. At times, they made matters worse, such as during the 1894 Pullman Strike, when their arrival — despite the governor's objections — sparked days of deadly rioting.
     Troops trampled American freedoms. One of the nation's worst cases of journalistic suppression happened in Chicago during the Civil War at the point of a bayonet. But soldiers also protected those rights, or tried to.
     In July 1951, Gov. Adlai Stevenson called out 300 members of the Illinois National Guard. Each was issued two rounds of ammunition, told not to shoot unless ordered and sent to Cicero, where a mob was rampaging around the home of Harvey E. Clark, a CTA bus driver whose family would have been the town's first Black residents.
     Except their potential neighbors rioted instead, trashing not only their apartment, but the building it was in. The Guard used tear gas; six Guard personnel were injured, four rioters were cut by bayonets. Young Guardsmen got a life lesson in hate, Chicago style.
     "I didn't think there were people like we saw last night," one admitted the next day.
     Military force isn't consistently effective. In April 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., President Lyndon Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act, which Trump has threatened to do. Thousands of soldiers patrolled the West Side, but were deployed too late, or in the wrong locations, to keep Madison Street from burning down.

Dispatching troops as a show of power

     Sending in troops as a vindictive show of power is nothing new. On June 3, 1863, two companies of the 65th Illinois Infantry marched out of Camp Douglas to the offices of the Chicago Times — no relation to the Sun-Times, thank goodness, as it was a Confederate-sympathizing scandal sheet run by an odious bigot, Wilbur Storey.
     Gen. Ambrose Burnside, chafing at recent Union defeats, decreed that "declaring sympathy for the enemy will not be allowed" and closed down the Times, citing its "repeated expression of disloyalty and incendiary statements," though the paper referring to him as the "butcher of Fredericksburg" might have also been a factor.
     That night, thousands of Chicagoans gathered to protest this "spectre of military despotism." The next day, President Abraham Lincoln rescinded Burnside's order.

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Flash! Crime terror doesn't grip Chicago

The biggest danger on the Riverwalk is someone stepping on your toe. Other areas of the city have more crime, but all told, Chicago is not the especially violent place it is being accused of being by President Donald Trump, trying to justify sending in the military

     My wife and I took the 2:36 Metra Downtown so I could co-host the Sun-Times Roast of the Chicago Skyline architectural boat tour. We could have taken the 3:36 and still made the boat. But, cautious man that I am, it seemed smart to build in time for train delays. I was worried enough about giving the tour without also having to worry about getting to the dock.
     Arriving at Union Station with two hours to spare, we decided to walk the 45 minutes to the Ogden Slip, so I could eyeball the riverfront I’d be describing. We took the Riverwalk, mobbed with young people on a gorgeous summer day, doing what young people do — drinking and talking and standing around. Some spots were like pushing toward the bar at a crowded party.
     None of this was extraordinary, and I only mention it here because we’ve got President Donald Trump calling Chicago the “worst and most dangerous city in the world, by far.”
     That’s ridiculous, or would be, except fear is contagious. Lots of readers echo him.
     “Hardly a night went by regardless of season that I did Not hear gunshots in Chicago,” wrote Mike Elmore, now a resident of Florida, who lived in the South Loop, two blocks west of Grant Park, and must have extraordinary hearing.
     “People who live and work in Chicago should feel safe there (just like the folks in Washington DC do now),” wrote Patricia Bajek, of the western suburbs, showing a surprising ability to read the minds of everybody in our nation’s capital. “I do not live in Chicago, nor do I visit it anymore. ... My last few times coming to Chicago before pulling the plug, I did not feel safe.”
     Maybe she didn’t. And some people feel unsteady trying to walk across the room. That is not, in itself, an indictment of walking.
     I shouldn’t mock these people — it isn’t entirely their fault. Not with the president slandering Chicago on a daily basis to rationalize sending in the military. Some obviously believe the man, which to me is dumbfounding, akin to sending $3,000 as a sign of good faith to the purported widow of an African businessman who reached out to you via email, trying to give away $200 million in gold bars.
     Throwing mud at Chicago is a kind of armchair sport. Anyone can play.
     “From what I have been told the absolute worst area is the West Garfield Park area,” Dan Baldwin wrote. “It got so bad there everyone moved out. Now nothing but empty building and empty lots. ... It’s a lot worse than anything in Baltimore or DC.”
     He’s never actually been there. I have. Al Raby High School. Garfield Park Conservatory, which is presenting its Artist’s Garden Flower Show until Sept. 14. You might argue that the conservatory is technically across Hamlin Avenue from West Garfield Park. But that is to delve into the factual world. When you explain crime statistics to people, they do not go, “Oh, sorry, I was misinformed.” They take what I’m saying — “Chicago is not an especially violent city; there are dozens of cities more dangerous, many in red states where the National Guard will never set foot” and twist it. “Ohhh, you’re saying Chicago is not violent at all!”

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