Out with the experts, in with the flunkies

 

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

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

William "Kyle" Carpenter by Mike McGregor

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OPENING SHOT . . .

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

AND I DID IT ALL BY MYSELF!!!

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

DOWNSTATERS GRAB THEIR PITCHFORKS

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

     Mr. Moses writes:

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

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

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

I'll park my feathery ass wherever I please!

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

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

Flashback 2001: Essee — The fire, light and love of Kup's life

Essee Kupcinet, right, with her famous husband
and noted singer Frank Sinatra

     Monday I ran the obituary of Sun-Times celebrity columnist Irv Kupcinet. So it seems fitting that today. I run his wife's.

     Reading this now, after 24 years, a few things come to mind.

     First, it might not be written quite this way today. We like to give people agency, and women tend not to be defined quite so much by who they married, even if that is the reason they're being written about. 

     Second, she was buried with a pack of cigarettes in her coffin.

    Third, it is Sun-Times policy to read obituaries to the next of kin — it's the one time in professional journalism where a person outside of the paper is given ... well, not pre-approval, but a chance to react to a story that's going in the paper before it's printed. I'm not exactly sure why that is. A kindness to the newly bereaved, I imagine. Errors are bad enough without fucking up the details of the life of a beloved relative who died a few days ago. So we fix those before the story is published. 

     I remember reading this over the telephone to Kup, a difficult moment for us both.

     She was a firecracker. She was a lady. She was his best friend.
     Esther "Essee" Kupcinet, 84, who died Saturday morning at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, was the wife of revered Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet.
     For more than 60 years, she shared his extraordinary life of fame and celebrity, supporting him in his phenomenal career and working energetically to improve the city they both loved.
     "You can't understand Irv Kupcinet unless you understand his wife," wrote critic Neil Tesser in a 1988 profile. "Where Kup remains even-keeled, Essee flies this way and that, blurting out his unspoken thoughts and giving vent to the emotions they share. In the division of responsibilities that characterizes every marriage, she expresses all that is impulsive about them, while Kup, unruffled, focuses on his demanding job."
     They were a team. She would pass items to him from sources she read that he might have missed. Mrs. Kupcinet boosted her husband relentlessly. In the 1940s, when she was out on the town with him tracking down gossip, she sometimes wore a blouse stenciled with his column's logo.
     "She was certainly one of the most colorful and interesting women in the history of Chicago, a passionate lover of communications and the arts," said Joe Morris, a friend and attorney of the Kupcinets.
     Though ailing in recent years, Mrs. Kupcinet loved cigarettes and wisecracks. She was famous for her sharp, often acid wit. After she volunteered to coordinate the Chicago visit of Queen Beatrix and Prince Claus of the Netherlands, she was stunned to find herself rewarded with the Order of Orange-Nassau in the Rank of Knight, which allowed her to be called "Dame."
     "How should we address you now?" asked an impressed friend.
     "Call me Sir Essee," Mrs. Kupcinet said. "I've been a dame for years."
     She kept her husband — famous for his daytime drowsiness induced by late-night club hopping — awake and on his toes. When he regaled his television audience with the time he had an "audition" with the pope, Essee could be heard hissing from the wings, "It's audience, not `audition,' you idiot!"
     Mrs. Kupcinet, a fan of the theater, was a great supporter of the arts. She was a founding trustee of the Chicago Academy for the Arts. She called it "my school," and the theater department there is named in her honor.
     She was born Esther Janice Solomon in Chicago, one of three children of Joseph and Doris Solomon. Her father was a successful druggist. As a girl "mad for Joan Crawford," she changed her middle name to Joan.
     Her father insisted his children go to college. She met Kupcinet in 1935 when she was a Northwestern University psychology major. He was a football player at the University of North Dakota, visiting Evanston to drop in on a friend who also happened to be her boyfriend.
     Four years later, she and Kup married.
     "I proposed," remembered Mrs. Kupcinet. "I said, `When are we going to get married?' "
     "Never," Kup answered.
     They wed Feb. 12, 1939. They spent their honeymoon in Florida, at baseball spring training.
     After college, she became assistant director of the Psychology Laboratory at Michael Reese Hospital, where she worked for three years. A former dancer, she also worked as a dance instructor.
     When her husband began his celebrity column in 1943, she vowed to accompany him into the whirl of Chicago nightlife.
     "When I first got the column, she was dubious," Kup wrote in his self-titled autobiography. "She thought — as did her mother — that I'd be surrounded by glamor girls at all times.
     "It was true that a lot of other columnists through the years, beginning with Walter Winchell, had at the very least strange marriages or, soon, no marriages at all. Walter never took his wife anywhere, and he was hardly ever at home, so you can draw your own conclusions.
      "Earl Wilson of the New York Post had started his column about the same time as mine, and Essee and Rosemary Wilson decided they weren't going to end up like Walter's wife, that they'd accompany their husbands as often as possible. It was fine with me, (and) we had the perfect menage a trois: the column, Essee and me."
      When Kup lunched with Humphrey Bogart and his new bride, Lauren Bacall, the morning after their wedding, Mrs. Kupcinet was at his side. She danced with Frank Sinatra, dined with Clark Gable and went to a drag ball in New York City with Tennessee Williams.
     They had two children, Jerry and Roberta Lynn, whom they called Cookie and who began her career as an actress under the name Karyn. When their daughter was murdered in Los Angeles in 1963, a week after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, Mrs. Kupcinet was devastated. She went to psychics, trying to contact Cookie, and visited the cemetery five times a week.
      For a year she was, by her description, "a zombie," lifted from her sorrow only by support from notables such as Kennedy family matriarch Rose Kennedy, who wrote to her at the suggestion of television giant Ed Sullivan.
      "Pray when your heart is heavy and you can find no solace, I shall pray for you, too," the president's mother wrote.
     "That letter showed strength such as Essee had never known," Kup wrote. "It inspired her to go on living, as Cookie would have wanted, even though Essee wanted to die with her."
     After her daughter's murder, Mrs. Kupcinet threw herself into support of the arts.
     "We should recognize local talent so they don't have to go out of town to work," she said. "If my daughter had more theater, she wouldn't have had to go to California."
     She and Kup established the Karyn Kupcinet Gallery at her high school, the Karyn Kupcinet Playhouse at Shimer College, a Karyn Kupcinet Center at Little City in Palatine and the Karyn Kupcinet International School for Science at the Weitzmann Institute in Israel.
     In 1982, Mrs. Kupcinet helped establish the Chicago Academy for the Arts, where she was named life honorary chairwoman.
     "If it wasn't for her, this school wouldn't be here," said Alice Gold, the registrar. "She was a wonderful, wonderful lady to this school."
     The Chicago Academy of the Arts will "stand as one of the permanent monuments to her," Morris said. 

      "The great tragedy in her life was the murder of her daughter, Karyn. Confronting this horrible tragedy of a daughter in her 20s murdered while trying to carve out a career for herself in Hollywood, Essee's response was to spend her lifetime creating opportunities for young people by the thousands to create careers in the arts."
     Mrs. Kupcinet also served in a variety of eclectic civil roles. She was a co-chairwoman of the Joseph Jefferson Awards and produced the theatrical awards' television program for eight years, winning a local Emmy for her work in 1977 and 1979. She headed the committee set up in 1983 when Mayor Jane Byrne ordered a songwriting contest to find an official Chicago anthem.
     She also began to work as talent coordinator on "Kup's Show," a role she filled for 20 years. She handled the many stars on the show with the same dagger wit she used on Kup, though sometimes they got the better of her. When she offered George Burns "a doughnut and a kiss," he replied, "How about two doughnuts?"
      She received many awards and honors. In 1974, she received the Prime Minister's Medal from Israel; in 1978, the Easter Seal Society's Humanitarian Award. She also shared many honors with Kup. In 1985, the Better Boys Foundation established a scholarship in their name. In 1987, Mayor Harold Washington presented an award to the couple for their support of the Illinois Film Festival, calling them "the first family of Chicago film."
      In 1988, they shared the Mass Media Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and she was the 1988 Variety Club Woman of the Year.
     In his autobiography, Kup wrote:
     "She's given me happiness, love, a lot of laughs and sometimes a lot of trouble. She's given me some of my best scoops, too. Once, when I was out of town getting a story, she wrote my column. I put a stop to that. She was too good.
     ". . . Neither one of us would tell you we haven't had our problems. Many days, marriage makes one-on-one tackle football on a cement sidewalk seem like a picnic. Yet, like very few couples, through my work and Essee's multi-talents, we've had the opportunity to `see it all,' as she puts it. And we've seen it together."
     One of Mrs. Kupcinet's brothers, Dr. Jerome Solomon, was killed in action in New Guinea in 1944.
     Survivors include her husband; her son, Jerry; two grandchildren, Kari and David; a great-grandson, Sam, and a brother, Leonard Solomon.
     Services will be at 10 a.m. Monday at Temple Shalom, 3480 N. Lake Shore Dr., followed by burial at Memorial Park in Skokie.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 17, 2001

Flashback 2003: 'Mr. Chicago' is dead at 91

     When mentioning Irv Kupcinet in my column last week, I went to check his obituary, and was surprised to see that it had never been posted here, despite my occasionally sharing runs of past obits when on vacation — which I will be this entire week. 

     That he was a man from a former era goes without saying — when journalists mattered, when they wielded true power, when there was at least a tang of reality to their relationships with the famous. Bob Hope MC'ed Kup's 25th anniversary dinner; when I hit 25 years of column writing, I didn't even mention it, not wanting to draw attention to my age.

     After he died, his faithful assistant Stella told me to take what I liked from his memento-jammed office. I helped myself to a coffee cup from Kup's Show, a photo of him smoking cigars with Nixon (which, sadly, I can't put my hands on at the moment) and the above street sign, from when the Wabash Avenue bridge was named in his honor in 1986. I had it in my office for years, but when we moved from the Apparel Center to smaller quarters on Racine Avenue, I gave it away to a reader as a prize in the Saturday contests that EGD used to hold.

    This obit is long — over 2500 words, more than three times the length of a regular column. We'd never run such a long obituary of a staffer nowadays. Then again, we don't employ anyone who would merit it.

     Irv Kupcinet knew everybody before they were anybody. He knew CBS's Mike Wallace when he was still Myron Wallace, an obscure announcer on a Chicago variety show. He reported from Israel when it was still British Palestine. And when he met Marilyn Monroe, she was still a brunette.
     He even knew this newspaper before it was the Sun-Times, back when it was just the Times and had yet to have its 1948 union with the Chicago Sun.
     Mr. Kupcinet — Kup, as he was known to one and all — wrote his column so well and so long that he seemed connected to every celebrity around. Kup had the phone numbers nobody had; stars who weren't taking calls took a call from Kup.
     Kup died Monday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he was admitted Sunday with respiratory complications from pneumonia. He was 91.
     "He was the best of the best in the business," said Stella Foster, his assistant for 34 years. "There will never be another. Never."
     Kup was friendly with presidents, barbers and the top A-list of Hollywood. It wasn't a press agentish, fake kind of friendship. He stayed at their homes — at Jack Benny's, at Danny Thomas', at Joan Crawford's. When he went on vacation, Bing Crosby might pitch in to write his column, or Mike Todd, or Betty Grable. Bob Hope spoke at the 1968 dinner honoring Kup's 25th anniversary as a columnist.
     He was known for nightclubbing, but he also gave dinners, and John Wayne might show up. Or Frank Sinatra, with Ava Gardner in tow, or Cary Grant, or Clark Gable, or too many others to mention.
     But he was no relic. Kup survived the changing times, on sheer determination, hard work and good contacts. He never retired. He never slowed down except under a doctor's orders. While his health deteriorated over recent years, Kup insisted on coming in to the office to write his column, always quipping that he wanted to be "terminal at the terminal," and he nearly was. His last column ran Nov. 6.
     Nobody could match Kup. He was a Chicago institution, the link between local celebrity and international fame.
     "Irv Kupcinet was as closely identified with Chicago as the Picasso, the Hancock Building and the Sears Tower — and he was an important part of this city long before they were," said Mayor Daley. "In six decades of columns, he had thousands of scoops — and when something was in Kup's Column, you knew it was true ... Chicago won't be quite the same without him."
     His passing "marks the end of an era," said Gov. Blagojevich, who offered condolences to readers of his column along with Kup's family. Kup's Column "was the source of information for all Chicagoans," the governor said. "Kup was a part of the fabric of Chicago. With his passing, he has now joined the pantheon of Chicago legends: Harry Caray; Walter Payton; Jack Brickhouse; Mayor Richard J. Daley; Mike Royko, and Ann Landers."
     He "was a great colleague and a great friend," said John Cruickshank, Sun-Times vice president of editorial. As "Mr. Chicago," he helped solidify the reputation of the paper, which takes "enormous pride" in his career, Cruickshank said. "Kup's greatness was as a connector of the disparate communities that make up Chicago," Cruickshank said.
     Indeed, when Cruickshank and Editor in Chief Michael Cooke arrived to lead the Sun-Times, Kup welcomed them to the city, Cooke said.
     "He had a work ethic that was staggering, but he also had the good sense to have the fun that journalism can give," Cooke said.
     He was the man in Booth One at the Pump Room, chatting easily with stars making the layover on the Super Chief and the California Zephyr. (A.J. Liebling, in his classic essay on Chicago, pointed out that the stars frequently stopped in Chicago specifically to talk to Kup; otherwise, they'd take the express.)
     "He was unique because he represented an era of the gossip columnist, the sportswriter and the political columnist all rolled into one," said Ald. Bernard Stone (50th). "What I remember best was that Kup never printed a story about me where he didn't call me first and check with me to make sure it was true."
     Kup lunched with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall at the Pump Room the day after they married in 1945. Harry Truman would phone to remind him to look after his daughter, Margaret, when she was in town.
     Kup covered every Academy Awards ceremony from 1945 to 1986. He went to London for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and crashed the dress rehearsal by flashing his Chicago police press card.
     Over the years, Kup's Column was distributed to more than 100 newspapers around the world and its author showered with innumerable awards. In 1982, he was elected to Chicago's Journalism Hall of Fame. The city renamed the Wabash Avenue bridge over the Chicago River in his honor in 1986.
     His other accomplishments were enough to fill several careers. He broadcast Chicago Bears football games, with Jack Brickhouse, for 24 years. He appeared in two movies, produced by friend Otto Preminger, "Advise and Consent" and "Anatomy of a Murder."
     He appeared on television as early as 1945 and was a pioneering television talk show host — he started on CBS in 1952 with a late-night news/interview program. In 1957, he replaced Jack Paar on NBC's "America After the Dark," which eventually became "The Tonight Show." His own television program ran from 1959 to 1986, syndicated at one point to 70 stations nationwide, and featured newsmakers from Richard Nixon to Alger Hiss to Malcolm X — with whom he forged an improbable friendship.
     The show was known for its spontaneity. Carl Sandburg once walked off the set in mid-broadcast, declaring he had to "wee-wee." Radical Abbie Hoffman lit up a joint on the air and was asked by Kup to leave.
     Ann Landers shocked the audience — and Kup — when, on a show that paired her with porn star Linda Lovelace, the advice columnist described in precise detail the act Lovelace was famous for.
     The show won 15 local Emmys and the prestigious Peabody Award.
     He was a close friend of Truman, who gave Kup and his family a personal tour of the White House while he was president. Eight years out of office, when Truman finally revealed why he had fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, he gave the scoop to Kup: The general had been chafing to attack Communist China with atomic bombs.
      A sign of Kup's lasting influence was that, decades later, when Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan wanted to make a public relations gesture toward the Jewish community, he did so by having dinner with Kup.

Born in North Lawndale

     Irving Kupcinet was born July 31, 1912, in the largely Jewish North Lawndale neighborhood around 16th and Kedzie, the youngest of four children of Russian immigrants Olga and Max Kupcinet. His father drove a bakery truck. As a young boy, Kup — whose nickname then was "Bubbles" — helped his father make deliveries on a horse and wagon.
     He got his first taste of journalism at Harrison High School, where he edited the school paper, starred in the school play and was president of the senior class.
     He also played football. He was good enough to earn a football scholarship to Northwestern University. But a fistfight with the coach's brother led to his transferring to the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks.
     He played on a college all-star football team with future president Gerald Ford. Kup was the quarterback, Ford was the center, and Kup always quipped that he had an intimate view of Ford.
     On graduation, Kup was drafted in 1935 by the Philadelphia Eagles of the National Football League. A serious shoulder injury cut that rookie season short, and he returned to Chicago, landing a $32.50-a-week sportswriter's job at the Chicago Daily Times late in 1935.
     Kup had his share of fistfights in that pre-litigious age: He was in the thick of a notorious brawl that took place April 3, 1937, in the lobby of a Tampa hotel, when Kup sallied to the defense of Jack Miley of the New York Daily News, who was taking on nearly the entire St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean, goaded by his wife, laid a punch on Kup and then ran away. The story made headlines for over a year, fed by Kup challenging Dean to a fair fight with taunts such as "You yellow-bellied, hen-pecked husband, you wouldn't fight a baby."
     As the 1930s ended, Kup was ready to trade fistfights for marital harmony. Four years earlier, he had met a feisty redheaded Northwestern undergrad named Esther "Essee" Solomon. The two wed on Feb. 12, 1939, and honeymooned at spring training in Florida.
     Kup covered the Bears and became close to Bears owner and founder George Halas. Kup worked as an NFL referee — a common practice for newspapermen at the time — and he presided over the Bears' historic 73-0 demolition of the Washington Redskins in the 1940 championships.
     The practice ended, the story goes, after a game between the Bears and the Green Bay Packers. Kup was head linesman and called for a measurement to see if the Bears had made a crucial first down. When it was determined they had, Kup headed for the sidelines whooping, "We made it!"
     By the early 1940s, Kup had his own sports column. Each column ended with a short "people" section. So he was a natural to be tapped by Times editor Russ Stewart for the new column he had in mind to rival Walter Winchell's. His competition in Chicago, Nate Gross at the old Chicago's American, was known for gathering his information over the phone, from home. So Kup shrewdly decided to go where the action was and get his news, hot, direct and firsthand.
      "I'd be there. I'd be visible," Kup recalled in his autobiography. "If someone had something worth printing, they'd know where to find me -- if I wasn't already within earshot."
     Kup's column debuted Jan. 18, 1943.

Making the rounds

     Kup, often with Essee at his side, did the rounds of Chicago nightclubs during their elegant heyday. The Chez Paree. The HiHat Club. The Trade Winds. The 5100 Club, where he saw Danny Thomas when he was just starting out. He took Bob Hope, of all people, to see Lenny Bruce, who returned the favor by basing a scathing routine on Kup (Saul Bellow, too, parodied Kup, using him as a character in Humboldt's Gift: "He looked haughty, creased and sleepy, like certain oil-rich American Indians from Oklahoma," Bellow wrote).
     So identified were Kup and Essee with the Ambassador East's Pump Room that the hotel installed a full-scale replica of Booth One, the restaurant's seat of prestige, in their East Lake View apartment.
     "Being mentioned in Kup's column was more important than being mentioned anywhere else," said Stone. "Being mentioned in Kup's column was the epitome of making it and being recognized as somebody."
     The couple had two children, Jerry and Karyn, who was called "Cookie." Cookie was an aspiring actress and moved to Hollywood, where she was murdered in 1963 at the age of 22. The crime was never solved.
     Kup grieved the loss of his daughter for the rest of his life. In 1966, when the Tribune syndicate asked Kup to replace the recently deceased Hedda Hopper, dangling a "mind-boggling" offer that included Hopper's Hollywood home, Kup refused, largely because he and Essee did not want to move to what he later described as "the Hollywood that had sucked our daughter into its maelstrom."
     While Kup did not dish the dirt that other gossip columnists thrived on, he was no lightweight, either. After he pointed out that Abigail Van Buren had reprinted a 20-year-old Dorothy Dix witticism in her "Dear Abby" column, a "furious" Van Buren never spoke to him again.
     When the Chicago Bar Association refused membership to a black attorney, claiming that it was a social club and not a professional organization, Kup riposted that its "members have some adjusting to do with Uncle Sam's Internal Revenue Department" since social club dues were not tax deductible.
      "His legacy is that of a communicator of substance and a bridge builder with compassion whose life and legacy made all of us better," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was in Atlanta when he heard of Kup's death.
     "Kup built bridges between the races and facilitated a dialog when there was no way out," said Jackson, adding that one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s last interviews was on Kup's show. "He was one of the few platforms we had to engage in the broader debate of social issues such as war and peace."

Wrong turn at Vatican

     Kup could laugh at himself. In his 1988 autobiography, Kup, a Man, an Era, a City, he tells the story of how, after meeting with Pope Pius XII in 1949, he exited through the wrong door in the Vatican.
     "Suddenly, I was in a giant red velvet room filled to capacity with 1,500 people ... all of whom began to genuflect at my entrance! I realized something was askew."
      Kup was a tireless worker for charities — raising funds at the Irv Kupcinet Open celebrity golf tournament and the old Harvest Moon Festival; conducting the annual Purple Heart Cruise outings for wounded veterans for 50 years after 1945, and as the original and perennial Chicago host of the annual Cerebral Palsy telethon. The Variety Club of Chicago and Little City were favorites.
      He also raised huge sums for Israeli organizations, especially the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he established the Karyn Kupcinet International Science School. He traveled to Palestine in 1947 to report on the plight of Jewish displaced persons trying to flee the aftermath of the war. In Israel's Judean Mountains, the Irv Kupcinet Forest now grows on what was barren land before 1960.
     "Irv Kupcinet's death leaves a large tear in Chicago's social fabric," said Cardinal Francis George, Chicago's Roman Catholic leader. "Interested in everyone and always kind in his comments, he was a treasured part of our lives. May God give him rest."
      Survivors include his son, Jerry, and two grandchildren, Kari Kupcinet Kriser and David Kupcinet, and two great-grandchildren.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, November 11, 2003 

Flashback 2006: Sometimes with the heroism comes the horror

 

Northbrook Memorial Day parade, 2024

     I almost hit you with a "Happy Memorial Day." Then thought about what the holiday represents — a day to honor fallen American military men and women —  and pulled back. I'm on vacation this week, so will instead wish you a restful, reflective day. And hope that, in between the barbecues and baseball games, you think of the soldiers who gave the ultimate sacrifice so we could enjoy the freedom we still possess, despite the best efforts of the vandals who have seized our government to destroy it. 

      I have no sense of security or confidence that this freedom will last to Memorial Day 2026. But here's hoping. This ran in 2006, when the column filled a page, and I've kept the original subheadings. Three officers were reprimanded after the Haditha massacre, and of the eight Marines charged, seven had their cases dismissed; one had most of the charges against him dropped, pleaded guilty to a single count of dereliction of duty, and given a reduction in rank and a pay cut.

OPENING SHOT

     Details of the atrocity the military believes occurred last November — the murder of two dozen Iraqi men, women and children in Haditha by U.S. Marines — have been trickling out over the last few days.
     Just in time for Memorial Day; another bitter irony in an increasingly bitter war.
     Needless to say, this alarming crime will thrill our enemies, while providing grist for those who would decamp from Iraq immediately, no matter what effect our leaving might have on this unfortunate nation we have placed under our care.
     The rest of us, Americans who are proud of our country, or try to be, will be left confused, puzzled and sad. We are the good guys. Aren't we? How did Marines — the Few, the Proud — end up shooting babies?

'SUPPORT OUR TROOPS'

     "Everybody feels fear," the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Manual states. "The occurrences of war will not unfold like clockwork."
     Anyone expecting a gung-ho guide to the sweet smell of victory is in for a surprise, reading the book. Words such as "chaos," "uncertainty" "disorder" and "horror" stand out.
     I read it eight years ago, on a plane heading to California, when the Marines invited me out to Camp Pendleton to observe their amphibious invasion maneuvers. I went there laden with the standard civilian's bias against the military as a bunch of lunkheads shooting things, and came away deeply impressed, with both the intelligence and the rigor of the training, and the discipline and integrity of the men and women of the Corps.
     The Haditha massacre will be big news in the weeks and months to come, as the investigation concludes and the prosecution and punishment of those involved unfolds. It will be put to all sorts of purposes by all sorts of people.
     But we need to remember that this lone horror is not a general indictment of our country or of our military. Put hundreds of thousands of troops in a swirling, confused, murderous chaos such as Iraq, kill off 2,700 of them in endless surprise attacks sprung in the midst of often-hostile civilian populations, and this kind of breakdown is inevitable. I am not justifying it, just saying that it almost had to happen, eventually.
     Nobody joins the U.S. Marine Corps because they want to slaughter little girls in desolate desert towns. The training is designed to avoid needless brutality. That does not mean we have tamed war. It is awful, and it does awful things to people. Right or wrong, we sent our fellow citizens over there to do a job, and something bad happened to a few of them.
     "Support Our Troops" doesn't mean applaud when the sun shines and turn your face away when it rains. They were ours when they rolled into Baghdad. They are ours now, even those who are snapped and broken and shamed and facing the justice they were supposedly fighting to protect.

MEMORIAL DAY, 2006

     The old flag was torn. It had blown against a sharp section of aluminum downspout and ripped. So we took it along with us to the Friday fish dinner at the local VFW Hall and dropped it off to be respectfully burned.
     That was after last Fourth of July. Which meant that in advance of today, Memorial Day, I had to buy a new flag. I was glad for the chance. The old flag had come with our house and was small and polyester and cheap. I took the opportunity to get something bigger and better-made — 3 by 5 feet, nylon, with embroidered stars.
      I love the American flag. I find it beautiful, not only in the harmony of red and white stripes, of stars on a blue background, but for what it represents: freedom and liberty, courage and honor and justice. I see the flag, and think of Rangers climbing up a cliff at Normandy Beach into the teeth of German machine-gunners. And the Statue of Liberty. And baseball.
      I remember, after 10 days in stinking Haitian slums and dusty back roads, talking to people born under life's boot with no hope and no chance, finally catching a glimpse of that red, white and blue banner snapping on a tall flagpole in front of the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince. The heart swells in a way you never forget.
      That said, I find it odious and frightening that Congress, in one of its periodic spasms of cowardice, is contemplating an amendment to the Constitution mandating respect for the flag. The flag-burning bill passed in the House and is a toss-up in the Senate.
      As much as I love the flag, and what it represents, I also understand there are people who see that flag and think of every wrong ever committed in its name, from the slaughter of the Indians to My Lai to, apparently, Haditha. Those are also facts, as real as Normandy Beach, and while I would disagree with such a viewpoint, I can't honestly say it's unjustifiable. It's their right to think that way.
      So far. I'll tell you this. No foreign dictator ever put the fear of losing our freedom into the heart of so many Americans as Congress is doing now. If you can't burn a flag today, tomorrow you might be forced to salute it.
      This morning, I'll put out my new flag — it really glows in the sun — drag my boys away from the Xbox and march them to the front porch, where we'll put our hands over our hearts and say the Pledge of Allegiance. Not because anyone is compelling us. Because I want to; because I think it is important to teach them patriotism.
     But if the Senate passes that ban . . . well, I like to think that I'll stand in the middle of the intersection of Madison and State at high noon, hold a flaming flag over my head and go to jail to protest the erosion of our freedom. I don't know if I'd have the guts. But I do know I'd never be able to fly the flag with the same pride. I might not be able to fly it at all. Because it wouldn't mean the same thing. It would be a banner of coerced respect, of the majority, misled by their craven leaders, muzzling the shrill and discontented few among us.
     It wouldn't be my flag anymore.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     A military joke seems in order today:
     As a group of soldiers stood in formation at an Army base, the drill sergeant said, "All right! All you idiots fall out."
     As the rest of the squad wandered away, one soldier remained at attention.
     The drill instructor walked over until he was eye-to-eye with him, and then raised a single eyebrow. The soldier smiled and said, "Sure was a lot of 'em, huh, sir?"
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 29, 2006

'That's human nature'

National Museum of African-American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.

     "What makes a young, educated person from Chicago do this?" my wife said at breakfast Saturday morning, not needing to explain that the person in question is accused murderer Elias Rodriguez, and the "this" is the killing of two young Jews, Sarah Lynn Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, both Israeli embassy staffers, in front of the Jewish Museum in Washington D.C. on Wednesday night.
     "Because he's worked up over the Palestinian situation," I replied. "He's so upset about innocent people being killed that he kills innocent people. That's human nature."