My top ten

 

The Sun-Times took this shot for some kind of promotional campaign that never happened. Yes, I
worried it was affected to take it at the Newberry Library. But one of my rules is: "Be who you are."

     I've written nine books. None of them is a collection of columns. A disappointment to me since, having assembled this list, such a volume would be fun (and easy) to put together. Heck, readers might even enjoy it. But whenever the subject is brought up (always by me) my agent, or whatever editor or publishing type I'm afflicting with my ideas, looks grim, shakes their head, and says the same thing: "Column collections don't sell." Particularly when they're never published. That was true when titans like Mike Royko and Steve Neal walked the earth. It's true now, I suppose. I don't know. I've never had one.

    Oh well, here online, we can do as we please. To mark my 30th anniversary (and yes, this has gone on — well, indulge me. There won't be a 40th) I've put together 10 of my all-time favorite columns over the years. It should really be 30 columns, given the 30th anniversary. But that would be a lot of work, and I can't imagine anyone actually looking at 30. Honestly, I can't imagine anyone looking at 20. Or 10. Or five. Or three. But I do hope you grab one and read it. Such as the one about Eugene O'Neill. My personal pipe dream, that prods me to perhaps work a little harder on these than the average newspaper fodder, is the hope that they might bear re-reading down the line. I like to think I'm right. Though I might be deluded. Like everybody else. Anyway, if you're new to the column, and want to see what pieces I'm most proud of, over the years, these stand out:

1. A great trumpet is 'a thing of beauty, an extension of you' — This is my favorite kind of story, where I pull a thread and see where it leads. In this case, I was visiting my son in Phoenix, and we went to the Museum of Musical Instruments. A fabulous place; think, the Louvre, but for instruments. I went back two more times, eventually noticing that a lot of brass instruments were made in Elkhart, Indiana. Home Conn Selmer. Only 90 miles away. It could have just been a factory visit, but I thought: this story should really begin with somebody playing a trumpet. And who should that person be, ideally? The Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Esteban Batallan. Facts make a story, and the fact about a silver bridge from the mouth of previous lead CSO trumpeter Bud Herseth becoming a plate affixed to the bottom of his horn's bell, well, when he told me, I actually turned to look for the studio audience so I could gesture in his direction, raise my eyebrows, and say, "Can you believe that?"

2. ‘Code yellow: Trauma in the emergency room’ Even before I was a columnist, I was interested in medical stories. I remember seeing the photo of a little boy kicking a balloon at a picnic for transplant recipients and thinking, "How do they transplant those kidneys?" I would watch a kidney transplant, heart transplant, lung transplant. Watch autopsies at the morgue and faces being rebuilt. I'm still at it — right now I'm slated to watch brain surgery because, really, how often do you get the chance? Such stories were never dull. Like any other aspect of this job, contacts are important, and for this story, I had to force my way in. Mount Sinai's initial response when I approached was, in essence. "No. No. HIPAA. No. Again no." But I persisted. By the time I was done with them, their CEO was asking me to be her interlocutor at the City Club. And when COVID struck the next year, Ashlee and I could hit the ground running at Mount Sinai because the door had already been kicked open.

3. You can lead a girl to slaw, but you can't make her eat: The story you set out after isn't always the story you write, and it's important to be ready to turn on a dime, scrap your expectations, and go with something else.  Top chef Sarah Stegner, whom I'd been writing about since she headed the Ritz Carlton dining room, is one of the most socially-conscious people I know, and she views coleslaw as an entry drug for salad, and was going to go to my kid's junior high school and teach the cooks there how to make it properly.

      I went expecting a culture clash between the Polish lunch ladies and the James-Beard-award-winning chef. What I didn't realize was a) they'd worked together before and b) I'd meet Lily Jaeger and her friends, the sort of real life that seldom gets into the newspapers. I was so nervous, falling out of the sky to capture quite intimate moments, that I did something I never do — I called her mother, after the fact, to get her permission to run the column. I didn't want her feeling wronged, and wrecking the joy I felt writing it. She went along. My only regret is not assigning a photographer, though, if I had, I might have been fussing over a picture of some sorts, and missed the details caught in this column. 

4. "A wild roller coaster ride through a dark tunnel" — Asking a question, then acting on it are two key skills to being a columnist. Plus thinking of people other than yourself. Three qualities that went into this column, after I sealed up a Cologuard colon cancer detection kit, containing, well, you know, and then had this thought: "Who opens the jar?" Answering the question involved lots of calls and driving 300 miles to Madison and back. But everyone at the paper instantly got what I was doing, and they gave it great play. 

5. "Abandoning our kids, then and now" — Being on the night shift for seven years meant I was working when most of the staff was not, and I became expert at, for instance, rifling through the library and the morgue, where the old newspaper clippings were kept, a place most reporters seldom entered. This column came from a manilla envelope I glimpsed while flipping through the As, "ABANDONED BABIES, 1940s." How could you not look at that? And notice how it isn't just a deep dive into the past — what's the point? — but I bring it up to date, using the past to illuminate the present. Which is what it's for.

6. "Crawl across the floor to me." This column was one of those experiences that gets branded into memory, so to speak. From first hearing about this dominatrix at a family Thanksgiving dinner, and saying, "Now there's a profession you just don't see in the paper much," to standing in front of her dungeon door on Lake Street, hesitating before going in, wondering whether this would break my fragile bond of connection with readers. I decided that I wasn't doing anything I was ashamed of, and if I wrote it correctly, that would be conveyed. I later heard afterward that Lilith felt ill-used, somehow, and I'm sorry for that, as I felt I treated her openly and honestly. I did quiz her mother — an extra step I was proud to take. Maybe she was mad about that.

7. Non-Native-American Guide — Imagine having a skilled journalist and storyteller documenting your kids' lives, from birth. How great would that be? Another columnist would ignore his family completely — not newsworthy — but sharing news was never my goal. Telling a story was.  Though news had a way of creeping in. Notice how this column on my older son's participation in Indian Guide's also captures a moment when the YMCA scrapped the "Indian Guides" name. They're now called the "Adventure Guides."

8. Why restrict child porn but not guns? "The trouble with you Len," Paddy Bauler once said to Hyde Park do-gooder Leon Despres, "is that you think it's on the up-and-up." In a sense, that's my problem too — I think I'm crafting reasoned arguments for reasonable people, not throwing chunks of raw chum into a seething mass of piranha. Which is more or less what I'm doing. This was written as a calm argument about gun control based on the First and Second Amendments. The headline, which I wrote, blandly restates the premise of the piece. What I didn't realize was that a) putting the word "child porn" in your headline makes the algorithms go crazy. b) to people for whom it is impossible to even conceptualize any sort of rational restriction of guns, it's easy to invert that thought into an argument for legalizing child porn. It became one of my most ... I almost said, "read" but that overstates the case ... reacted to columns, by legions of people who never bothered to read it, or anything else, as far as I can tell. 

9. O'Neill's 'Palace of Pipe Dreams'  A newspaper column is a literary form, like Haiku, that demands certain qualities. An element of personality — I write a lot of obituaries, for instance, but they're not about me. My picture isn't generally on them Because they're not columns. A column also should be a certain length — say 500 to 1,000 words. Over the years I've managed to play with the form, now and then. I've written columns in the form of poems, or dialogues, or transcripts. This one I'm particularly proud of — it's an interview with actor Brian Dennehy, written in the form of a play that is also a parody of Eugene O'Neill. 

10. Girl X's mute testimony speaks to heart of agony: Here is another example of playing with the form — in this case, using assistant state's attorney Anita Alvarez reciting. the alphabet as a way to structure the column. If you read it, you'll notice I posted it for my anniversary joining the staff of the paper — anniversaries are big in the journalism world, a peg to hang information that otherwise might seem out-of-left field, and pointless. Which I hope this exercise in nostalgia doesn't seem. Tomorrow we got back to the daily grind of reacting to headlines, assuming they print the column I turned in. I know I've done my job when I worry they won't.

Coping with the grief of a loved one lost to COVID

Sandra Wittman

     A black-and-white cat paused in the doorway, giving me the once-over.
     "There's Oscar," said Sandra Wittman, sitting on a bentwood rocking chair in her Carpentersville home. "When he hears a male voice, he comes. Just in case it's Norm, his daddy."
     It's not, and never will be, as Wittman outlined in an email:
     "You wrote a column about my husband, Norm Kopp, who died of Covid five years ago today. That article meant a lot to me and put a face on the more than a million Covid victims in our country. I am 82 now. It has been a difficult five years and, since we never had children, I am alone with my cat Oscar and sometimes lonely. I miss him every day. I am still living in the home we shared which is filled with memories."
     Is it ever. Art from trips to Venice and Spain. Sculptures of cats. Grief is not easily told or understood. But given how completely the 1 million victims of COVID and their millions of immediate survivors have been swept under the rug, I felt obligated to try.
     Wittman had a photo waiting on the coffee table.
     "That was our 15th anniversary of living in sin," she said. "You know, we were never married. I call him my husband. What else should I call him? 'My boyfriend?' We were 70-something years old."
     They met over 40 years ago, in a singles bar in Schaumburg.
     "He was so bright, so funny," she said. "I learned to eat Mexican. We really enhanced each other's lives. We did exciting things together. We didn't have a lot in common at the beginning. At the end, I didn't think we were joined at the hip ..."
     She paused, as if realizing anew.
     "Yeah. We were."
     Becoming unjoined was excruciating.
     "I have to tell you how he died," she said. "We were so careful, all those months. Then in December, it was announced, they were going to release the vaccine. His doctor said he would be on the list for high risk. Then the Trump administration cut the vaccine numbers to Illinois because we're a blue state. So he didn't get the vaccine."
     Instead he got COVID. From her, she believes.
     "I hurt my foot and had to go for an MRI. ... I'm pretty sure that's where I got it. There was 
horrendous guilt that I brought it home."
     They Zoomed, so he could see Oscar. "You need to come home," she said.

     Instead, Kopp got worse in mid-January.  
     "The nurse said, if he makes it through the night you can come over here and be with him when he dies. Which was a real gift, because most people didn't get to do that. I watched him die through glass. It took three minutes. I don't even remember how I got home. I was completely alone. Nobody was here."

     Alone took getting used to.

     "What are the five years like?" she mused. "I hardly remember the first two. I kept hitting my head. When you're grieving, you lose connection with your body. You're not yourself. You've lost control, and this horrible thing has happened. I was constantly banging my head on something, or falling down."

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Flashback 1992: High voltage

On the west communications mast of the John Hancock Building in 1992. (Photo by Robert A. Davis)

     Wednesday is the 30th anniversary of my regular column first appearing in the Sun-Times, and I prepared a list of all-time favorite columns to post today. Looking for something to illustrate it, I came across this photo — from before I was a columnist, true, but reflecting a certain spirit. And I realized, much as I like to paint the years beforehand as being spent slumped in the corner of a late night newsroom, waiting for something to burn down, that wasn't entirely the situation. There was fun and adventure too, such as this story — which I somehow never posted before. The list can wait until Thursday.

     A hundred and thirty floors above downtown Chicago, the city is utterly quiet. No car horns, no grinding truck gears, no sirens. Only the endless howling of the wind.
     And, of course, the voices of the workmen, as they scramble over the twin communications masts of the John Hancock Building, which are receiving a rare refurbishing after years of exposure to the brutal elements.
     To hear the workmen's voices, before the wind carries their words away, you must climb up onto the masts, higher than most people care to go.
     "We don't get many visitors," says a paint-spattered Greg Teeters, coming down from a night spent on the towers.
     They work mostly at night because the television and radio antennas lining the masts have power going through them. Those antennas could cook somebody. But shutting off the power is not always easy. During ratings sweeps week, one TV station refused to cut transmission and work had to be suspended.
     The antennas are shaped strangely — a pair of interlocking, curved sausages; a batwing grill; several giant snare drums; a few clusters of boxes. Some stick out at right angles. They act like vocal cords for the wind.
     "You hear it singing," said Phil Elliot, one of the workmen on the site. "Boy, it's pretty wild."
     About two dozen workers are taking part in some aspect of the project. Most are ironworkers, familiar with working where a misstep means instant death. All say that focusing your attention on safety and work, and ignoring the height and danger, is key.
     "You don't think about it, that's the thing. You just do it," said William "Bud" Mudd. "You start thinking about it, you screw up."
     The work, which began in early August, was divided into three stages. First, the red beacons atop the masts were replaced. The 2 1/2 foot-tall aviation beacons, 1,455 feet, 6 inches above the street, had been untouched since the building was dedicated in July, 1968. They had not burned out, but 24 years of weather faded their glow and corroded their circuits.
     Next, the tops of the towers were painted, for the first time in 14 years, by workers wearing lifelines, with plastic half-gallon jugs of paint hanging off their belts. This was the phase where winds caused delays. The project was to have wrapped up about now, but will continue for several more weeks.
      The last phase of work is being done now on scaffolding at the base of the masts. The bases are more accessible than the tops, so have been painted several times. Old layers of paint are scraped off before the new can be applied.
     Here came more delay, as the scaffolding crews, unused to the height and the winds, stopped work under conditions ironworkers didn't blink at.
     For a layman setting out to climb the towers, the journey is both fearsome and incredible. The Hancock elevator makes its final stop at the 98th floor, which is jammed with pumps and wild electrical gear, such as 3,000-amp fuses the size of tomato juice cans. Their elements are packed in sand to reduce the damage when they blow up.
     A stairway to the 99th floor reveals television equipment — big steel cases, marked with network logos. Another stair leads to the 100th floor — the roof — where air-conditioner steam floats out of giant, 10-foot-wide horizontal fans, slowly turning. Atop the boxlike "penthouse," a grove of white pole antennas, faintly visible from the ground, waves like bamboo in the strong wind.
     To go further, you must climb. Hand over hand, up a ladder, about 400 feet from the roof to the top beacon. At first you are inside a roomy metal cylinder — the white solid base of the mast, as seen from the ground. Inside, it is hot, and you are surrounded by conduits and naked copper pipes.
     After about 100 feet, you clear the cylinder, exit a hatch, and are outside, surrounded by the triangular structure of the middle section of the tower. Even in summer, the metal chills your hands.
     The climb through the triangular structure seems frightening only until the final ascent: a free-climb scramble up a narrow set of metal pegs jutting out of the thin pipe that tops each mast. It is not for the faint at heart.
     "Tower people have to be a unique kind of person," says Seth Elliot, president of Communications Site Management, the company overseeing the project. "Not totally insane — if you got crazy people, you've got a problem. They need to be calm, cool and collected, but with a certain degree of bravado. It's hard to find people to do that kind of thing."

            — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 4, 1992

  

Chicago Restaurant Week, a time to enjoy good food, served well in nice places

 

     "Remind me," I told my wife, as a pair of luscious pork chops were slid under my nose at Psistaria Greek Taverna on Touhy, "Why do we go other places?"
     That moment, the only-restaurant-in-the-world flash, is a peak dining experience. You can eat food at home. But restaurants are a joy of life, each as awash with unique personality as a good stage play.
     Since Chicago Restaurant Week began Friday (and runs until Feb. 8; actually two weeks), when dining establishments across the city entice patrons with special deals, I thought I would explore what makes a restaurant shine.
     A great dining experience is a tripod, standing on three legs: food, service and atmosphere. I don't need to ponder at all to pinpoint the best meal I've eaten this past year — the grilled chicken in a garlic honey marinade with vegetables at 5 Rabanitos in Pilsen. It's such a massive plate of food, as I start in, I assume I'll take half home. But that would require me to stop eating at some point, and I always fail. The room is gorgeous, too, busy with art, reminding the National Museum of Mexican Art is a block away.
     The media loves to focus on recently opened restaurants. They're news, I suppose. But in my dotage, I prefer old favorites, though am glad when the boys, true foodies, steer us to unfamiliar places that prove worthwhile.
     We met the younger lad after work at a small Loop spot he'd found, Bereket Turkish Mediterranean Restaurant, 333 S. Franklin. An inviting room, with saffron walls. Delicious, juicy kabobs. But it was the warm service at the family-owned restaurant that really stood out.
     Something happened at dessert on our first visit I believe has never happened to me in a restaurant before. My wife and I ordered a square of flan and a chocolate baklava, to share, and the waitress brought the flan and three baklavas.
     Oh no, we protested, just the one. We just want to taste it. We tried to make her take the extra two back. That's OK, she said, they're on the house. We tried our baklava: fresh and fantastic — not too sweet. Guilt set in. I called the waitress over and insisted: we must pay for the three pieces — they were so good, we enjoyed them so much, it was a revelation.
     "No, it's impossible," she said. "The bill is already made up." We yielded; I tipped 30% and left wondering if that were enough. We returned next before a show at the Lyric — Bereket is the perfect pre-opera spot.
     Another problem with the mania for the new is that old standbys get overlooked. Every time I eat at Lou Mitchell's on Jackson, it's always crowded. But I still feel the century-old icon doesn't get enough attention. The food obviously — thick slices of Greek toast, gorgeous club sandwiches, all sorts of little free extras: donut holes, cups of ice cream. The skilled, honey-let-me-fill-that-up waitstaff. But the room — a pure, beating heart of Chicago vibe as befits a century-old restaurant, second only to Harry Caray's.
     The downside to Lou Mitchell's — and even the best restaurant has a downside — is enormous and must be emphasized: IT'S CLOSED MONDAYS AND TUESDAYS. It took me several disappointed visits, waiting in front of the locked doors to meet someone, for that to sink in. Their right, of course. Still. Tuesdays? C'mon guys, COVID's over.

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RIP, Jens Zorn

  

At the cemetery in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania

     Readers sometimes mistake the obituaries that run in newspapers for the obituaries published by funeral homes. The former are news stories written by journalists summarizing the lives of notable persons for general readers.
     The latter are paid praise, usually generated with maximum emotion but little art by recently bereaved families, and of interest primarily to other loved ones and friends of the departed. (When those run in the newspaper, they're called "death notices," fine print funeral home obituaries considered paid advertising).
     Lately, grieving families fill out a form, and AI generates an obituary for them. My old college roommate Kier recently asked me to render one such effort, about his mother, into English. I was surprised — at this point I shouldn't be — by what a wordy, trite, exaggerated, godawful mess the funeral home considered acceptable. If this is the best AI can do, I'd say, time to protect your assets against the coming crash:

     "Jody's journey from her early years was marked by determination, passion, and an unwavering generosity that left an indelible impact on all those who knew her..."

     "A woman of many talents and interests... "

     "[Her] spirit will live on in the hearts of those she touched, forever remembered as a beacon of love, devotion, and warmth." 

     I cut it in half, losing lines of fluff that, being true for anyone, are true for no one, adding information I knew about her laudable life, allowing her the dignity of having "died" rather than "passed away," a euphemism that fools nobody. Death is what this is about.

     Sunday I read with interest the obituary of Jens Zorn, 94, published by the Nie Family Funeral Home of Ann Arbor, Michigan. For starters, because he was my friend Eric's father. Then because it was so well-written, by Eric I assume. Here's the first paragraph:

     "Jens C. Zorn, 94, was a physicist, an artist, a teacher, an administrator, a musician, a husband, a father and grandfather. He died at St. Joseph Hospital in the company of his son and daughter early on the morning of Jan. 5, 2026, of a cascading constellation of the maladies of age."

     A less talented writer would have said his father "filled many roles" or some such thing, but Eric just laid them out, giving the same emphasis to his professional career — "physicist" — as he did to his hobbies "musician" and his family roles — "husband" etc. Itself a triumph of balance and humanity which readers of Eric's know is his forte.
     Did that cause of death jump out at you? "A cascading constellation of the maladies of age." Now I've read thousands of obituaries, and never encountered the cause of death described  with anywhere near that kind of poetry. Cause of death is a delicate moment in an obituary. Too vague and you risk implying something dire — particularly with young people, who kill themselves and have the fact vigorously ignored — too specific and you risk marring a long, productive life with a sticky end. At 94, no cause is needed — you're old, you died — but Eric coined a beautiful phrase that is also unique. No one has written that about anyone's death before in the history of ever. I checked.
     A phrase like that keeps a reader going, hungry for more, though actually it was the parallels between Prof. Zorn and my own father's life that kept striking me. Both married in 1954 — Prof . Zorn was a year older than my dad. Both were nuclear physicists. Both were artists later in life.
     Here they departed wildly. Even more striking, in the more literal sense of being beaten, is that Prof. Zorn was the center of a vast network of friends and associates, and I, being genetically self-absorbed,  couldn't help but contrast that to my own father: a solitary, friendless man who basically worked by himself in a corner of NASA — I used to joke he was his own division. The paragraph that sent me sulking like Saul in his tent was this:

     "Jens was a warm, generous, curious and humble man who was in touch with friends and relatives around the world. He had lively conversations around the dining table about politics, sports, technology, art and social issues until just days before he died."  

     What would I write about my own dad, when the time comes? "Steinberg was a cold, tightfisted, hidebound and vainglorious man who kept an iron focus on himself and his own matchbox jammed with obsessions, isolated, alienating everyone he knew, starting with his brother, his children and grandchildren whom he never could even feign an interest in...."

     There was more. Prof. Zorn's sculptures are displayed across North America. My father, while feverish about his watercolors, would never lower himself by attempting to put them in a gallery, or promote them beyond haranguing whoever happened to be in front of him. 
     Envy is an ugly emotion, and I immediately shook it off. We are all dealt our cards and play them, best we can. My father's father was described to me by one of his other grandchildren as "a monster" who beat his sons. My father was a considerable improvement over that, and I like to think I'm a vast improvement over him, and am certain that my sons are such a huge improvement on their father that the only valid emotion I am permitted to have toward my lot is gratitude, gratitude and more gratitude. 
     Life might be understood backwards, but it is lived forward. I finished Jens Zorn's obituary thinking that while it is a little late for me to learn a musical instrument, it is not too late to tend to my own tattered network of friends. For starters, I reached out to Eric, asked if this post would be too intrusive, and reminded him we're overdue for lunch.

Works in progress: Charles Berg

  

Letter (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I have a soft spot for folks who write letters to newspapers. Passionate, opinionated, often making excellent points, they're like amateur, shambolic, unpaid columnists. I owe my Chicago memoir to a frequent newspaper letter writer, Bill Savage, who midwifed the process.

     This is from a regular reader, Charles Berg, of Hyde Park-Kenwood, complained that the Sun-Times editorial page took a pass on it. I read what he had to say, and it made sense to me, so I asked him if I could share it on my blog. He enthusiastically agreed. Its headline is: "Trump Administration Financial Accounting."

     Most organizations – including governments – have budgets: estimates of the expenses of operation and the expected revenues needed to meet those expenses. Related to this are ongoing accountings of funds received and distributed.
     During this past year, vast sums of new incomes have been declared by the Trump administration: money from tariffs, money extorted from law firms, etc. There have also been savings by the refusal of the administration to fund programs established by Congress. Further, there have been the revocations of hundreds of millions of dollars of grants made for medical and scientific research – and threats of withholding of funds allocated to cities and states that do not comply with Trump’s edicts. And then there are the “donations” made by entities seeking to curry Trump’s favor (or forestall his ire).
     In addition, the ad hoc “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was supposed to be cutting expenditures via elimination of “waste and fraud.” Many of their initials claims of massive savings have been disproven; their main goals were not financial – but rather the destruction of entities (like the Department of Education and international organizations) that the administration disliked. “Waste and fraud” turns out to have been nothing more than a convenient justification: NO efforts were made to identify and correct systemic problems.
     Where have the accumulated billions gone – what accounting is there? And what have these monies been used for? Clearly not for services benefitting the American public (many of those have been undercut or abolished). Clearly not to assist local law enforcement (despite the administration’s charges of lawlessness in some cities, like Chicago). Clearly not to protect our nation’s natural resources. Clearly not to promote the development of American industries. Clearly not to bring down inflation and the price increases affecting most Americans.
     How much of these funds have been used to pay for judicial assaults on Trump’s “enemies”? To pay recruitment bonuses to enlist Border Patrol and ICE agents to pursue the administration’s anti-immigration policies? To pay for their deployment to round up immigrants (seldom the “worst of the worst,” as claimed – while assaulting citizens and causing fear in the process)? To pay for Kristi Noem’s anti-immigration ads on radio and TV? To pay for legal defense against the many state and local lawsuits filed against the administration’s policies? Have some of these monies ended up in Trump’s own coffers?
     And now it has just been announced that Trump has sold $500,000,000 of seized Venezuelan oil – and put the money, not in the US Treasury, but in a bank in Qatar!! This is staring to remind me of the song in “Evita,” which includes the lyrics “When the money keeps rolling …you don't keep books … accountants only slow things down.”
      The American public should demand a fiscal accounting from the Trump administration – which, of course, will use all means possible to prevent this (denials, delays, refusals to comply with judicial orders and congressional acts, etc.).

Uptown Poetry Slam founder faces the wilderness, live onstage

Marc Kelly Smith

     Shutting up is an art form that I struggle to master. A challenge for many of us older guys, from whom nobody wants to hear anything. We've had our say.
     Several times during the only Bears games I watched this season, the last two, the camera focused in on the "GSH" on the left arms of players' jerseys, and I had to stifle the impulse to explain to my wife, "George Stanley Halas, founder of the Bears."
     Which would have inevitably led to my sharing one of my favorite bits of sports trivia: In the 1920s, when Halas took over the team and moved it from Decatur to Chicago, the practice was to name a city's pro football team after its existing baseball team. Which is how you got New York Giants in both sports. But Halas, noting that players are bigger in football than in baseball, said they're too tough to be Cubs; they're Bears. The name stuck.
     Or so the story goes.
     I didn't say any of that. She enjoyed the game and said we might consider watching this football next year, an outcome not unrelated to my efforts to maintain a manly silence.
     Halas died in in 1983. Most key formative figures in Chicago sports — William Wrigley, Charles Comiskey, Bill Wirtz — are long gone.
     But one Chicago sports pioneer still walks among us. Marc Kelly Smith founded the Uptown Poetry Slam, first at the Get Me High Lounge, then 40 years ago this July, at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge. And if you're thinking, "Poetry is not sports," then you haven't been to the Green Mill and witnessed the slam on the third Sunday of every month.
     As someone who has watched Michael Jordan dunk a basketball, shared an outfield with Minnie Minoso at a charity softball game and watched a Cubs game from inside the scoreboard at Wrigley Field, I can assure you that the poetry slam is as peak a Chicago competitive experience as they come. Poetry is like rugby — not that popular, but plenty tough.
     Smith is appearing in a one-man show this weekend at Chicago's 50-seat Kimball Arts Center, and I phoned to ask him why, at 76, he is still talking. Why bother?
     "That's a good question," Smith said. "When the COVID pandemic hit, I thought, 'Well, OK, the run at the Green Mill, 35 years, that's a pretty good run.' Time to back off the career."
     He'd bought a house in Savanna, Illinois, "a river rat town on the Mississippi," 2½ hours west of Chicago, as a fixer-upper project.
     "I've always been a city guy," Smith said. "But I drove through the area. It was just so cheap. I came back one day and got a house to restore."
     With events drying up post-COVID, he gave up his Chicago apartment and moved there full time. The plan was to write a novel, watch the river flow and the years pass. But he succumbed to that trap snaring so many aging writers: complaining about their shrinking worlds.

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