‘Hey kid, want some candy and a button?’

     Oh, c’mon.
     Everyone is being so mean, beating up on poor Lori Lightfoot for trying to pressure Chicago Public School children into joining her mayoral campaign. The same campaign that sent an email prodding CPS teachers to enlist their charges to spend 12 hours a week working for free for a Chicago mayor sunk to a nadir of unpopularity not seen since Levi Boone closed the city saloons on Sundays.
     It isn’t like this is the most questionable gambit to gin up mayoral campaign support in the city’s history. There have been worse.
     Remember Joe Gardner? Mild-mannered water reclamation district commissioner. Round glasses. Threw his hat into the ring against Mayor Richard M. Daley in the 1995 primary.
     I was sent to attend Gardner’s announcement rally.
     Here’s how I later described the event:

     I started to notice something strange about the crowd. They seemed a lot more hostile than you would expect from a campaign kick-off crowd, which is normally a pretty cheery bunch. A lot of young, angry guys milling around. I commented to a savvy photographer that I didn’t realize so many young men in baseball caps and oversized pants took such a passionate interest in politics.
     ”They’re Gangster Disciples,” the photographer said. While I didn’t check for membership cards, it certainly seemed to me that Gardner was padding his crowd with gang members.

     I had the presence of mind to ask Gardner if he intended on making a policy of recruiting gangs into his campaign.
     ”I don’t separate people on the basis of gang membership or non-gang membership as long as members and leadership are engaged in positive things,” Gardner replied, before rhapsodizing gangs as an unappreciated force for good, a brand of starry-eyed cluelessness I thought was the exclusive domain of Hyde Park liberals circa 1969.
     Daley beat him like a drum, almost 2 to 1.
     So give Lightfoot credit. At least she hasn’t reached out to Chicago street gangs. Not yet anyway. And the unwise email to CPS should be a passing embarrassment.

  

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Flashback 1997: In toyland, it's not all games

           

    I can't believe I've never posted this before. Of all the factory visits I've made in this city, Strombecker is among my favorites. That "grime-darkened wood barrel" I saw there lives in my memory — it was like something you expected hardtack to be store in aboard a clipper ship crossing the Atlantic in 1850. And yes, I only went because I loved their little cars as a child — and yes, the one above is mine.  In 2004, Strombecker was purchased by Processed Plastics Inc., a struggling Alabama toymaker, which closed down the Chicago plant in 2005. 
    

     The Strombecker Corp. didn't have a hit toy this season. No Tickle Me Elmo, no Beanie Babies, no Sing & Snore Ernie. It didn't have a hit toy last season, either, or the season before that.

     In fact, the West Side toy company has never had a fad toy sensation: no Hula-Hoops, no Slinkies, no Monopoly. Not in its 121-year history.
     Still, Strombecker thrives, relying on the old standbys, the year-in, year-out building blocks of childhood — in some cases literally building blocks, with painted, natural wood and alphabet sets. Plus metal cars, bubble pipes, paddle balls, plastic farm animals, tea sets, army men, cap pistols and some 700 other varieties of common toys, mostly sold under its Tootsietoy brand, none of which has caused a riot at Toys R Us, at least not yet.
     In fact, the toy being manufactured one day earlier this month at Strombecker's Pulaski Road plant (it has another factory on Lake Street, three others in the United States and a Canadian plant) isn't even sold at Toys R Us. It's a gun — a Pony Boy Western-style six-shooter — and guns were kicked off the retail giant's shelves in 1994.
     The area where the guns are being cast has a high school shop class smell, oily and metallic. The guns are made of zinc alloy, which arrives in long, heavy ingots that are melted down and injected into molds, each mold making all the pieces needed to produce a pistol, the pieces held together by trees, like a model car fresh from the box. Strombecker also makes the rolls of red caps that go in the guns.
     Production is very low tech. One gun at a time. The mold opens, a worker uses pliers to grab the hot, flat tree of connected gun parts, hangs it on an overhead conveyor chain and greases the mold for the next injection.
     The six-shooter components spend 20 minutes cooling before another worker plucks them off, cuts the pieces apart with a press, triggers falling one way, left and right halves another.
     The raw pieces are tumbled to wear off sharp edges. The small tumbler used for trigger pieces is practically an antique: a grime-darkened wood barrel mounted on a spinning mechanism.
     The finished components, collected in green bins, are assembled by hand in the next room. Lula Williams, who has worked at Strombecker for 23 years, can put together the eight pieces that make up a Pony Boy pistol in less than 30 seconds, or about 130 an hour. Is there an interesting aspect to the job?
     "No, not really," she says.
     The guns are a reminder that the toy business is not all fun. Toys are a luxury item that rise and fall on public whim. The Toys R Us gun banishment is typical of the kind of problem that can crop up out of nowhere. A child molester in Australia called himself Mr. Bubbles; the scandal hurt sales of Strombecker's bubble liquid, which by unhappy coincidence is sold under the Mr. Bubbles brand name.
     Or F. W. Woolworth's. The chain's failure was more than an exercise in nostalgia for Strombecker; once Woolworth's was Strombecker's biggest customer.
     "We're not getting much business from them anymore," said Dan Shure, CEO and president of the company and the fourth generation in his family to run it.
     In addition to the occasional freak disaster, the market has grown tighter in many ways. For instance, the days when Detroit automakers paid to produce the dies to make Tootsietoy cars in their model lines — as a form of promotion — are long gone.
     To help make ends meet, the company moved its metal car production to China, where labor costs $3 a day, compared with $10 an hour on the West Side.
     Adaptability has gotten Strombecker to where it is today, selling $50 million worth of toys annually. Strombecker began in 1876 as the National Laundry Journal, a magazine for the commercial laundries.
     Impressed by the possibilities of a Linotype machine displayed at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, the owners of the Journal bought one, figuring that if the machine could mold letters of type, it could also make little toys to give away as premiums to draw children, and their parents, into laundries.
     The first giveaway toy was, appropriately, a metal flatiron, later joined by a top hat, a Scottie dog, a shoe, a battleship and a race car.
     Sound familiar? By an odd twist of history, that original flatiron and other early metal toys can be seen, to this day, in every Monopoly set, since Charles Darrow, the inventor of Monopoly, used the laundry freebies as tokens when he created his game during the Depression.
     By then, the company was packaging the little toys, selling them in cigar shops and magazine stands.
     In 1898, it teamed up with a Chicago classic, Cracker Jack, and provided the free surprise inside boxes of Cracker Jack for more than half a century.
     At the Lake Street plant, seven workers cut and package jump ropes, while nearby is the production line spewing out liquid bubbles — Strombecker is the largest producer of bubble fluid in the world, 30,000 gallons a day to be blown into bubbles by children in 60 countries.
     The bubbles flowing into colorful plastic bottles on the West Side in December will find themselves floating above children's heads from Seattle to Singapore.
     "I travel around the world," Shure said. "It's a nice feeling to be in a shop in Zimbabwe and see a bottle of our bubbles."
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 25, 1997

‘We live better than the kings’

Jim Kendros

     “Good afternoon everyone. I’m very happy to be back again at Belmont Village. My name is Jim Kendros, and I had such a wonderful time being here before. We’re going to explore great music today.”
     An audience of about two dozen people, including my parents, gathered in the lobby of a senior living community in Buffalo Grove last week.
     “Today I have a program called ‘Mozart and More,’” Kendros continues.
     He plays “Carol of the Bells” on the piano. It quickly becomes clear that the lobby is not the best environment for a recital. Noisy conversations erupt. Phones ring. A few residents arrive, late and loudly. A janitor rolls a garbage can rumbling by.
     None of this fazes Kendros, talking major versus minor, diving into musical theory.
     “Chances are you have heard something we call the ‘incipit’ in music,” he says. “I-N-C-I-P-I-T. It’s a Latin word that basically means the smallest part of a melody.”
     Kendros does this for a living. He also lectures before concerts, as well as social clubs and libraries. He is a composer, creator of the Mount Prospect Overture.
     For me, just visiting here once a week can be an occasion for somber reflection. I wondered how Kendros views his audience.
     “They’re near the end of their lives, even though I hope they will live another 20, 30 years,” he told me, earlier, over the phone. “I would like to believe I’m bringing them not only new things to think about but helping them to feel younger.”

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Flashback 1998: Roy Rogers "He could always move the merchandise"

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

     One point being debated in our new union contract is whether to put constraints on freelance work. That's nuts. I've always freelanced — that's what got me writing for the Sun-Times in the first place — and am proud of the range of publications I've written for. This is the only piece I've ever had published in Sports Illustrated. It came about because I was researching Roy Roger's obit — I had come upon a story of him proposing to Dale Evans, a Chicago radio singer, while on horseback at the old Chicago Stadium in 1947, and thought that moment alone was worth eulogizing Roy. One of the clips was a photo from Parade magazine in 1960 of Roy in front of all this NFL crap, and it said .... well, I'll let you read the story. The only other thing I want to add is this only got published because I approached Rick Telander, who had just come to the paper from Sports Illustrated, and asked him for a contact. Generous soul that he was then and is now, he put me in touch with an editor.

     The easiest way to show love for your team is to buy its official logo T-shirt. Or baby bib. Or key chain, chips bowl, coffee cup or athletic sock, or one of the thousands of other products plastered with pro team logos. Sports licensing is a multibillion-dollar business that grows bigger every year. But it wasn't always so. Go back 40 years, to the first effort, by the National Football League, to sell a team image on a national scale. There, smiling and squinting and patting the side of his trusty palomino, is the unexpected figure of Roy Rogers.
     Yes, Roy Rogers, the King of the Cowboys, who died on July 6 at the age of 86, was the midwife of national sports team marketing. When the original NFL Enterprises--now called NFL Properties, the division of the NFL that licenses team logos--was created in 1959, it was a division of Roy Rogers Enterprises. Happy trails, indeed. Before Rogers rode into town, each of the 12 NFL teams took care of its own licensing, what little there was. Some teams even gave away their rights, thinking the team was getting free publicity.
     In 1958 the Los Angeles Rams, the first team to put its logo on the side of its helmets, started selling a bobble-head doll of a Rams player. The doll was a hit. "This is the first we can identify of team logos being applied to a product," says Roger Atkin, who recently retired as vice president of retail sales at NFL Properties.
     That success did not go unnoticed by Rogers, a genius marketer.
     His TV show, which aired from 1951 to '57, was one of the most popular of the decade. At the peak of his fame, 400 Roy Rogers products were on sale. The 1955 Sears catalogue offered 13 pages of Roy Rogers gear--cowboy outfits, lunch boxes, flashlights, hats, slippers, watches, even an inflatable Trigger.
     Rogers's earnings from his licensing agreements dwarfed his salary as a cowboy star, and after his show went off the air, he couldn't see himself returning to the grind of making movies.

     "He just decided he didn't want to make any more films," says Larry Kent, 85, who was general manager of Roy Rogers Enterprises. With the notion that pro teams could tap into the same market as cowboy stars, Rogers approached Major League Baseball, which took a pass. The NFL didn't. Talks began, spearheaded by Pete Rozelle, then the dynamic young general manager of the Rams.

     In March 1959, Rogers offered to build a national licensing program for the league, and late that year the NFL signed a two-year contract with him to do all its marketing and licensing. Rogers got half the royalties, and the 12 team owners got the other half.

     The first team memorabilia sold nationally was a set of glassware carrying team logos. Standard Oil bought it to give away with fill-ups at its gas stations. "Up to that point nobody had done anything nationally," says Kent. "from then on the thing took off. When adults started identifying with teams, it grew into a gigantic business. They bought everything."

     Within a year Rogers had lined up 45 manufacturers, churning out about 300 NFL products—cigarette lighters, dolls, vacuum. bottles, ties, blankets, coats, pajamas and more. The strange marriage between branding iron and gridiron, however, didn't last. When the contract came up for renewal in 1962, Kent leaped from Roy Rogers Enterprises to the burgeoning NFL. 

     "The business got stolen away from him," Roy Rogers Jr. said of his father. "It was always a sore issue with him. Larry Kent took the program with him."

     Kent, who ran NFL Properties until 1971, says today that Rogers quickly lost interest in the football business, though he credits the cowboy star as the dynamo who got the ball rolling. "He was a force," says Kent. Still, the question remains as to who first thought to market sports merchandise nationwide. "It was my idea," Kent says.

     The Rogers camp doesn't object. "Dad would have been the first to tell you that he never got off the horse," says Roy Jr. "He had good people running his industry."

     That might be unfair to Rogers, known as a savvy executive who parlayed bit parts in B-movie Westerns into an image worth millions. In 1960 a newspaper reporter asked why a TV cowboy was handling marketing for the NFL. Roger's answer must have seemed radical then: "Merchandising is merchandising. There's no difference, whether a store is selling a Roy Rogers revolver or a junior St. Louis Cardinals football outfit just like the pros wear."

     The NFL turned its business over to him, he said, because he had "the merchandising setup, the organization." Besides, Rogers added, what do NFL team owners know about business? "What they were primarily interested in was winning football games," he said, showing that some things do indeed change.

Assault rifle toll familiar to ER surgeons

Dr. Arthur Berg at work, left.

     Thursday night in South Florida, a rapper named French Montana was shooting a video at a popular Miami soul food restaurant called The Licking. Dr. Arthur Berg was not far away, at his health club, exercising.
     Outside the restaurant, a dispute among two groups in the crowd. Someone squeezed a trigger; 10 people were hit. A few minutes later, while Berg was sprinting on the treadmill, his phone rang.
     It was about 8:30 p.m. Berg, who grew up in Oak Brook, had already worked a full day, starting 10 a.m., ending 7:30 p.m., removing two gallbladders and performing an appendectomy. But he left the gym and hurried to his central Miami hospital — he asked me not to specify which — answering the all-hands-on-deck signal they call a “mass casualty event.”
     “Unfortunately, it’s not a very uncommon thing around here,” said Berg, doing his fellowship in trauma and surgical critical care. “I don’t know what it’s like in Chicago. But down here in Miami, the gun restrictions are a lot looser, and we see our fair share of pretty horrendous injuries. We’re talking about massive soft tissue injuries. We’re talking about shattered bones. We’re talking about mangled extremities.”
     While legislators argue over defining “assault rifle” — a ban on such weapons passed the Illinois House on Friday and this week goes to the state Senate, where it is expected to pass — Berg has no trouble parsing the distinction. He knows right away what kind of gun made the wounds he’s struggling to treat.
     “From a handgun you see a small aperture, in-and-out,” he said. “When you get shot with something like an assault rifle, these high-caliber rifles cause these really destructive injuries.”

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A bullet for the teacher.

Library of Congress

   
     Journalists are not supposed to guess. Rather, we gather what facts we can, present them in as coherent a fashion as we can, try to think about them, and maybe draw such conclusions that are supported by evidence.
     But sometimes we can go out on a limb.
     Knowing nothing about the situation in Virginia except that a 6-year-old in Newport News took a gun to school Friday and shot his teacher at Richneck Elementary School, leaving her with "life-threatening injuries," I will nevertheless state this conjecture as a near-certainty: some adult bought that gun thinking he was protecting himself, and perhaps protecting that kid, and then left it in a place where the child could get at it.
     Another life shattered — correction, group of lives shattered — by the get-the-drop-on-the-bad-guy fantasy.
     That gun owner should be charged with a crime. And as horrible as this shooting is, let me share the really horrible part, which you might not realize: it's not the first time in this country that a 6-year-old has taken a gun to school and shot someone. It has happened before. Several times. And we do nothing, because that's what we do best. So here's another safe conjecture: it will happen again.

Northshore Notes: I Am Anxious, Therefore I Am?

     We each take something different from every book, picture, experience, day. I think I'm going to hold onto the Kierkegaard line about anxiety from Northshore bureau chief Caren Jeskey's post today. Or try to. Lately I'm not sure how how well I hold onto things. It's like tucking a smooth stone into a pocket with a hole in it. Which might be a very Caren-like observation. I suppose I should embrace the hole — otherwise I'd end up with a pocket jammed with stones, and who wants that? Enjoy.

By Caren Jeskey 

     “Man is the supreme Talisman. Lack of a proper education hath, however, deprived him of that which he doth inherently possess. Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.”
                                                       — Baha'u'llah: Gleanings

     Per Albert Camus, following meaningful pursuits in life enables us to survive the pain of being human. “The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”
     From the very little Soren Kierkegaard I’ve read, it seems he believed our best choice is to embrace the anxiety that’s inherent and unavoidable in all sentient beings. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” If we can tolerate, and better yet befriend, our often tender inner selves and also vulnerably connect with others, perhaps we’ll feel less alone and less afraid. We'll have the courage and humility to take ourselves less seriously. Kierkegaard suggests doing what we want in our short lifetimes, if we can. I wondered how hedonistic this guy thought we should be? The answer seems to be … not a lot. Rather, we’d best create an aesthetically pleasing life — whatever that means to us. Fully experience being a human who’s going to die, rather than pretending we are not going to die. 

     Speaking of absurdist philosophy, it seems strange to admit that I received a bit of twisted joy (and some sorrow) this week watching Fox News. When I was younger, Fox was the place to go for some of the best shows. The X-Files. House. The Simpsons. Why am I no longer welcomed there? Turns out I'm OK with it. Not a party I want to join. The bizarre reasoning coming out of plastic spray-tanned faces of many of Fox’s performers has given me a glimpse into some right wing (and all QAnon) fanatics who think that real news is fake, and vice versa. As I listened to their tragically hilarious uninformed malarky, I wondered if I were Jim Carey in The Truman Show. Surreality at its finest.
     Then I wondered if the broken people committing atrocities are actually horror-film actors. I wish they were. But no. Just a bunch of heathens with all of the mental horsepower of Hot Wheels. I’m glad I watched, since now I can see how naïve viewers might be conned into drinking the juice of the false American dream. They do a good job of acting like they know what they are talking about with facial expressions SNL worthy.
     I know this is serious stuff. It’s not lost on me that our new democracy is failing. But I am tired of being depressed.
     One’s chemical state affects everything. Philosophers of yore did not grapple with the same challenges we face today. I wonder what their brains looked like? If Carl Jung’s collective unconscious is real, which I believe it is, those who have lived in previous eras cannot fully inform the complexity of the human condition of the 21st Century. They did not face the realities of global warming, for example. Did they realize how precarious our blue marble really is?
     Well, it turns out that maybe they did. I found a book called Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophe: Learning to Live on a Damaged Planet Goodness gracious. I have a lot to read.
     The end of 2022 brought many sentiments of gratitude from my therapy clients, the most I’ve ever received. After an often grueling year filled with unexpected uncertainties and sicknesses, I felt pleasantly surprised. It was an acknowledgement that therapy works. I didn’t take an undue amount of credit, for everything I offer has been taught to me. I am grateful to be safe enough to hold space for others. A friend has a Ukrainian flag hanging over her front windows. Each night she goes to sleep and makes sure to remember how fortunate she is. Why not enjoy freedom, when we can.
     A current Jeskey post would not be complete without mentioning treasures buried in the sand, given my new beach-combing addiction. On Thursday I set out for a long walk before starting the work day. As I approached the Baha’i temple I beheld it’s stark beauty. I found myself getting closer and closer. While I’d planned to head to the lake, going inside seemed like a better idea. I sat and meditated, and (mostly) resisted a strong urge to pick up my phone for an hour or so. I practiced box breathing and a simple mindfulness exercise. The pull of my phone that I'd tucked away and out of sight was almost scary, considering the exquisitely serene cavernous space. But I made it, mostly. (Well, ok. I looked at my phone three times in the last five minutes of my practice to see how much time I had left). Afterwards I headed to the beach and found some of the coolest things ever. I took some, left others behind, and by the time I got back home six hours after I'd left, I was OK.

“The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.”
                          ― Robert Greene, Mastery