Nobelist Louise Glück’s poetry offers fierce beauty

 

                                                Hydra and Kali, by Damien Hirst

     You know how they give out the Nobel Prize in literature and it always seems to be some Icelandic novelist you never heard of? And you think, “Oh, I must pick up one of his books”? Then you never do.
      At least that’s my usual reaction. But not this year. Thursday it was announced the 2020 honor goes to Louise Glück, “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” 

     My reaction, “Wow! Louise Glück rocks!”   

     I’ve read all of Glück’s poetry, some poems many times. Sometimes in public, from a stage. I’ve not only talked with her on the phone but bargained with her and, ultimately, paid her money for her poems.      

     Where to begin? Something utterly ordinary, like the setting of a Glück poem — a room, with a table, a chair — only in this case, a newspaper, where lots of books arrive daily unsolicited. Unread books piled on tables, to be disposed of at “book sales,” where the staff snaps them up for two dollars each, the money going to charity.
     I see this fat book and am drawn — wait for it — by the pretty dark orange stripe running across the bottom and the blurry photograph of Saturn — I love dark orange! I love Saturn! The title, “Louise Glück: Poems 1962-2012” means nothing. She was poet laureate of the United States, yes, but who keeps track of those?

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The CTA cuts through the clutter

  

      My older teen is a fusspot, who occasionally corrects my language — "Father, it's not who am I talking to?" he'll archly announce, "but to whom am I talking?"
     I suppress the natural fatherly response — "Shut up you" — and say, "I'm allowed to use the vernacular," i.e., our own native language, the way normal people normally speak.
     This was a hard-won right. Once the elites spoke in French; prayers were in Latin. Common folk were low peasants, and expected to be ashamed of their low peasant ways.
     That changed, thank you democracy, thank you mass media, thank you the general falling away of pious dogma and pointless rules.
     When I saw the CTA courtesy poster headlined, "Your maid doesn't work here," and beginning, "Please don't leave your crap behind," my first, unfiltered thought was, "Good for you, CTA." A slightly salty word, a bit of vernacular that might actually cut through the clutter and lodge itself into the mind of the rider, far better than the expected "Please don't leave your litter or personal effects behind."
     Public transit exortations almost demand a little attitude to work. New York, which invented saucy signs ("Don't even THINK of parking here") started a courtesy campaign last year on its trains that suggests its riders are strippers: “Pole Are For Your Safety, Not Your Latest Routine."
      To be honest, I considered remarking on the CTA's moment of courage, but then decided that I'm too biased. I swear like a sailor. I'm the guy whose personal blog is called "Every goddamn day," accepting that for every 50 readers who laugh at the title, there will be one person squirming. Sorry, squirming person. I think the rules keeping obscenity out of newspapers and network TV are dumb. I think the "n-word" locution is an insult to African-Americans, suggesting they'll collapse in a swoon confronted with raw history. I conform through gritted teeth, unwilling.
     Maybe a few are comforted by such niceties. But those few always try to run the show.  Rather than change their expectations, they want to force everybody to harmonize with whatever little girl's ballerina music box they've got tinkling away in the back of their minds.
     For instance, Lara Weber, a member of the Tribune editorial board, in a recent op-ed piece, chides the CTA for using its piquant word. She's too clever to do so in classic, ruffled Margaret Dumont style, quickly admitting that her qualms are more a reflection on herself and her upbringing. Still, she upbraids the CTA, anyway, because her mother didn't use the word.
     "Jeez Louise, are we really using 'crap' on official printed signs now?" she asks.
     Umm, yes, we are. And the president isn't wearing a necktie at some official functions, which would have left people a generation ago aghast.
     And — spoiler alert — Napoleon escaped from Elba. I'm sorry if I'm the one to tell you.
     Yes, a writer wants to keep certain words in reserve. Notice that "Jeez" at the beginning of Weber's cri de coeur. A euphemism for "Jesus," and, in this situation, an apt one. You want to reserve "Jesus," not to shield delicate reader sentiment, but for times when its verbal power is required. "Jesus, I am dying..."
     I'm tempted to chide the Tribune for being Ms. Grundy, again, the same publication that for decades tried to force simplified spelling down the throats of its readers — "thru" and "dropt" and "cigaret" — in the self-absorbed Teddy Roosevelt-esque notion that they knew better than their readers, and to bear the white man's burden of tidying up the language of Shakespeare.
     But the Tribune can be saucy, historically; it is the same publication that once emblazoned the word "C*NT" — the asterisk is theirs — across the front of its women's section, in a story of how that British cuss word for female anatomy was enjoying a certain vogue. They lost their nerve at the last moment and pulled the section. But we across the street got a copy that wasn't destroyed, and admired the ginger inspiring some ghost in the machine to even make the attempt. 
     Writers fail continually through excessive caution; they should try to fail more on the side of boldness. Someone is going to be offended by almost anything you write, if you do it correctly; the key is to hold their interest while using the right word in the right place. The garbage that careless riders leave behind on the bus is "crap," and the CTA should be lauded for taking a risk in trying to get rid of it.

Is razor sharpness heritable?

Cafe reader, Amsterdam

     For all my vaunted rationality, there is an undercurrent of mysticism in me. That's nothing to be proud of — it's as common as dirt. But nothing to be ashamed of, either . . . I hope.
     What do I mean? I was reading the New York Times obituary of Louise Glück, the great American poet who died Saturday. How to describe her? Kind of the anti-Mary Oliver. If nature in Oliver's poems is affirming, redemptive, serene — those reassuring wild geese flapping into view to tell us everything's okay. -- then Glück's world is “bleak,” “alienated” and “austere.” When Glück writes "I set myself on fire" the reader wants to blaze alongside her.

      The future Nobel laureate allowed me to use seven of her poems in the literary guide to recovery, "Out of the Wreck I Rise," I wrote with Sara Bader, and I was grateful, and felt perhaps an even stronger kinship than the one inspired by reading her poems, since we'd spoken several times and money changed hands. I wrote about her three years back, and you can read more here.
     The Times spoke of Glück's "remorseless wit and razor-sharp language" and then dropped this little factoid: "Her father, Daniel, was a businessman and a frustrated poet who, among other things, helped invent the X-Acto knife."

     Say no more! My mind instantly connected that "razor-sharp language" to the small triangular heads of those hobby knives. As if her incisive genius were inherited, almost pre-ordained.
     Which is both silly and how people think. Though why should it be? We do take something from our parents — that's undeniable. Maybe the silly part is anthropomorphizing the X-Acto blade into Glück's raw voice. Very Mary Oliver-ish of me, now that I think of it. Oh well, I suspect that, as much as I admire the Glücks of the world, I'm really a softie at heart.

The I'm from Chicago Polka (for piano)

     Maybe Al Capone did us a favor. 

     Chicagoans wince at having their international reputation tied to a 1920s gangster, still, after all these years. Or Michael Jordan. Or whatever shard of Chicago urban culture washes up on a distant shore (if that metaphor can even be used in the digital age. Though it sounds so much better than "flashes on a distant screen.")
     But this? Regular readers know that I routinely make use of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's vast online collection of free, downloadable images to illustrate my efforts here. The Met is useful but, I've found, has limits. It doesn't have everything, and sometimes the site is a dry well. So when I saw that a consortium of 14 Paris museums had opened up their own image portal, I had to take a look.
     What to search for? I could have plugged in "Renoir" or "automobiles" or "Notre Dame." But being provincial myself, I plugged in "Chicago"—let's see what images of us they harbor—and was rewarded for my local pride with this sheet music.
     The "I am from Chicago Polka." For piano. With the image of one of the more ridiculous one-man-band rustics ever engraved That's when I sudden felt a flash of gratitude to Scarface. Is this how the French saw us? Is it how they see us now? Is it who we are?
   

Charles Lecocq

 Plenty of information on the artifact to unpack. "Ch. Lecocq" is Charles Lecocq, a French composer of light and comic operas in the latter half of the 19th century, little remembered today.
     "La Vie Mondaine"—"Social Life" or maybe "Worldly Life"—was an three act opera of Lecocq's, first performed at Paris' Théâtre des Novelties on Feb. 13, 1885.
     The large "Arban" at the bottom refers to Jean-Baptiste Arban, a big-deal composer and conductor at the time.
    That'll do. I probably shouldn't go too far into the weeds in dredging up the history of 1880s French musical comedy, except to note that the polka had indeed been a craze in France—in the 1840s. Lecocq evoking it in the mid-1880s reflected his slide into irrelevance that began decades before his death in 1918.
     But what is the explanation of the yokel illustrating the song? Chicago's reputation as an ethnic enclave? Perhaps it reflects French hostility toward America in general and our cities in particular. 
     "The city was pitiable, ugly and boring," Philippe Roger writes, in "The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism," referring not specifically to Chicago, but to the French 19th century view of American cities. "It was banality incarnate, quintessentially parochial."
     Chicago certainly was a cow town, a hardship post.
     "Bread is almost unknown in Chicago," French diplomat Francois Bruwaert wrote, recounting the joy of discovering a French bakery at the 1893 Columbian Exposition.  Lacking proper bakeries, Chicagoans attempt to produce bread at home and do so "badly."
      Bruwaert's visit, reproduced in the classic "As Others See Chicago: Impressions of Visitors 1673-1933" (edited by  Bessie Louise Pierce) is a delight of contempt and self-reference. The World's Fair is worthy only to the degree it celebrates France. Bruwaert tries "toasted corn," aka popcorn, and finds it "detestable," while allowing "it suffices to occupy the youngsters." In his defense, he does eventually suggest something that will "most surprise the foreigner who is enterprising enough to come as far as Chicago" is that the city is "beautiful," and he marvels that it could rise from a swamp in the span of 50 years.
     I had hoped that the lyrics to the song would offer fresh wonders. But when I finally found the entire 11-page score online I discovered that, alas, it is an instrumental. Probably just as well. If there were lyrics, my hunch is they would not be an ode to Chicago's splendor.
     No need. We supply that ourselves. Continually.

Flashback 1987: Ending the agony of terminal illness by suicide — Hemlock Society fights for the right to die.

 

"The Death of Socrates," by Jacques Louis David (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     My colleague Tina Sfondeles wrote an important story on a pending law that would let terminally ill Illinoisans end their lives. When I read it, I immediately thought of this story, written a few weeks before I was hired by the Sun-Times. It made an impression on me. I can still remember Don Shaw pulling that big amber bottle out of the drawer. I also distinctly recall thinking, "These people are hot to kill themselves." I was 26. Now that I've had 37 years more of experience, I know that one reason the American medical system is the cruel, expensive farce it often seems to be is because control is wrenched away from the people who should exert it. 

     Don Shaw died at 81 in May, 2001, at a senior care facility in Evansville, Indiana. The Hemlock Society was renamed End-of-Life Choices in 2003, and the next year became Compassion and Choices. 

     Asked what he would do if he ever was struck by a catastrophic illness, Donald Shaw pulls open a desk drawer and reaches for an amber plastic bottle filled with 50 red capsules. Each capsule contains 100 milligrams of the tranquilizer Seconal.
     "What I would do is take it out of the little shells — a hell of a job — and mix it with honey or ice cream," he says. "The stuff is bitter."
     Shaw goes on to describe how he would drink whiskey, to multiply the fatal effect of the overdose, eat a light snack and take an antiregurgitative to help keep the poisonous mixture down.
     An amiable, robust man of 67, Shaw talks casually about the prospects of suicide, as do many members of the Hemlock Society, an international group advocating that terminally ill people should have the right to kill themselves.
     The Hemlock Society reports having 13,000 members, most of them in the United States. About 300 of those members are in Illinois, mostly around Chicago.
     Shaw, a former Episcopalian priest, is chairman of the Illinois chapter. His interest in the subject of escaping terminal illness through suicide began after his mother's protracted death.
     "My mother died of cancer when I was 25," he says. "My aunt and I took turns caring for her 24 hours a day. Until one day she said: `Don, I'm going to stop eating. I just want to die.' And for me it was absolutely sensible."
     Members of the Hemlock Society plan for their own deaths, convincing relatives not to take "heroic" measures to keep them alive, stockpiling fatal doses of drugs and lobbying for a variety of "right-to-die" issues.
     They support legislation, such as the Illinois Living Will Act of 1983, which created a document where signers request "that my moment of death shall not be artificially postponed . . . if at any time I should have an incurable injury, disease or illness judged to be a terminal condition by my attending physician. . . . "
     The society was formed in 1980 by Derek Humphry, a British journalist who assisted his terminally ill wife in killing herself. His book chronicling that experience, Jean's Way, and other writings, including Let Me Die Before I Wake, a guide to suicide methods, are distributed by the society.
     The name of the society, "Hemlock," refers to a poisonous herb of the carrot family. The poison is famous as being the one Socrates, the Greek philosopher, was forced to drink in 399 B.C., a suicide that ironically goes against Hemlock Society principles, which state that suicide should be voluntary and not due to any emotional, traumatic or financial reason unassociated with terminal illness.
     "I'm sorry we have the name, but I'm perfectly willing to make the best of it," says Shaw.
     The Illinois chapter holds monthly meetings, where members watch films related to the right-to-die movement, discuss issues and socialize.
     "It's an interesting group of people," said Louise Haack, a retired teacher. "I've been to two meetings; it's nice to be with people of like mind. So often the perception is that this must be a bunch of Gloomy Guses. But this is not the case. The people I have met through Hemlock are very lively indeed, and most are bent on living a long and productive life."
     Haack, 62, has her own stockpile of drugs, but worries about the drugs losing their potency over time.
     "I probably do not have a lethal dose of anything at this point," she says, "because medicines do become outdated. You need a spectrum of medical doctors who will prescribe 30 of this or 30 of that so you can acquire a lethal dosage, and that is a handicap nowadays."
     Like Shaw, Haack's interest in the Hemlock Society came from the death of a parent. Five years ago her father died of colon cancer at age 88.
     "That made me realize it would have been nice if he and I could have had a conversation about how we'd like to leave this earth," she says. "Fortunately, we had pretty good nursing-home care, and the principal physician in charge was in tune to not having this old gentleman returned to the hospital for any reason. The doctor knew how I felt, and had some discussions with the nursing-home staff. Nothing in writing, but a tacit understanding.
     "My father was struck with influenza, which could have been `cured.' They could have called for an ambulance, taken him to a hospital, all that garbage. But they did allow my father to die, without making an issue of it, and I'm very grateful for that. He did have a peaceful departure, certainly compared to what it could have been. A certain amount of homework can prevent the horror stories we have heard of.
     "A friend had mentioned the Hemlock Society. I wrote away for literature and joined. I've been very, very impressed with the thoughtfulness and leadership and care with which these subjects are being discussed. I don't thing everybody needs to make this commitment, but everyone needs to look at this issue and think about it."
     According to Shaw, while death was once an accepted part of the cycle of life, today it is a distant and taboo subject.
     "Death is a part of living, a part of life, Shaw says. "In most cases it's welcome. But still death is something that is not talked about, not prepared for. One reason is that people don't die at home anymore. They used to die at home. Everybody knew what death was about. Children saw it. In the old days, there was no place else to die. I think the problem began when death was removed from home and placed in the hands of specialists, hospitals and funeral directors."
     Shaw has certainly planned out his own death in some detail. Not only has he arranged a convenient means of suicide, should the opportunity to kill himself arise, but he has planned the ceremonies surrounding his passing. His tombstone is already in place, in a cemetery in Enid, Okla., and preparations have been made for his wake.
     "A cocktail party: hors d'oeuvres, some of my special music," he says, smiling at the thought. "It's going to be a joyous occasion, if I die soon enough. If I get to be 85, they're won't be as many people there.
     "I have here my suicide letter to my family," he continues, producing a 1,200-word document beginning "Dear Family and Selected Friends" and dealing mostly with Shaw's belief that suicide is a valid avenue should "the dissatisfactions of life significantly outweigh the satisfactions."
     When asked what he meant when he referred to a suicide-inducing "catastrophic" illness, Shaw said it was "some physical condition the treatment of which I was not able to pay for."
     It is an attitude that is questioned by some people.
     "When do you decide a disease is life- threatening?" asked Ken Howard, head of the clinical psychology department at Northwestern University and an expert in the area of suicide. "I see a potential harm in having a support group that says whenever life is too hard for you - you have skin cancer that may or may not metastasize - you monitor it yourself, and whenever you get too scared go ahead and take these pills. I don't think that's good advice.
     "I'd like to see the extent that their plans are really followed through," Howard said. "My experience with people who have taken that position is once they get the first signs of a life-threatening disease they do what everybody else does: fight dearly."
     Howard said that, rather than being ultimately concerned with death, Hemlock Society members instead are trying to gain a feeling of control over their own lives.
     "One way to make peace with the fact that you're going to die is to say you have the power to make that happen," he says. "It's a case of ultimate control; one way of saying: This is my life, and I have some say in it."
     And in fact, Shaw reports that, in the five years of his being chairman of the Hemlock Society in Illinois, he has never had a member commit suicide.
     Shaw's son, David Shaw, 37, a lawyer in Evansville, Ind., finds himself in general agreement with his father's principles, but also suspects that there are other issues at work, beyond avoidance of terminal illness.
     "I'd say that's probably a fair observation," says David Shaw. "If he's going to go, he'd rather do it himself. I'd say it's a matter of control. I'd think he'd like to go out with style."
            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 3, 1987

Don't be afraid: it's just poetry

     The great Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post's two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, called me out over this column in a Twitter exchange (from Aussie hookers to the best columnist working—I piss off 'em all). Actually, he wasn't mad, just questioned whether something could be poetry if it doesn't rhyme. I answered an emphatic "YES!" but he held his ground. There is no accounting for taste, and I'm trying to forget that he finds "Death of the Hired Man" by Robert Frost to be tripe. To me this is all a quibble over semantics: poems are what people call poems.

     Friday was cold and windy. Getting dressed for the Cubs home opener, I thought: better put on my Under Armour. Which is usually reserved for skiing or when it’s 15 below zero. But I worried that high-tech long johns were overkill, so I fired off an email to a Cub fan buddy, who would be at the game. Is wearing long underwear to the ballpark in April, I asked, a “prudent precaution” or a “shameful stratagem?”

     You’ll notice the alliteration in that question. Not an accident. “Prudent precaution” came naturally, then I paused, searching for the right “s” word to put after “shameful.”

     Not poetic, of course, but a reminder that we can all use language to decorate and enhance the most ordinary moments of our lives, like checking with a pal to see if wearing long underwear to Wrigley Field will mark a guy as a weakling. (“I will be wearing mine,” he answered, a reply I was grateful for when the wind picked up and the temperature dropped after the sixth).

     Cut to the next day, around Sheffield and Fullerton, I noticed the sleek Pegasus logo of the Poetry Foundation on a placard atop a taxi cab. Oh right. April is National Poetry Month, and while the commencement of baseball is marked in Chicago with pomp, solemnity and mass ritual, events like Poetry Month are shrugged off by the vast majority, which is just plain wrong. 

     First, poetry is important. Yes, as with long underwear, there is a whiff of effeminacy to it that many guys find off-putting. A cultural slur you’d think we would have abandoned long ago. Soldiers write poetry, not only a century ago, such as  Wilfred Owen’s classic “Dulce et Decorum Est,” about a World War I gas attack (Go online and read it right now, “As under a green sea, I saw him drowning/In all my dreams, before my helpless sight/He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.”) 

     But also soldiers fighting today. Brian Turner, in his collection “Here, Bullet” sees a sergeant shoot a crane in Iraq. "It pauses, as if amazed death has found it/here, at 7 a.m. on such a beautiful morning, before pitching over the side and falling/in a slow unraveling of feathers and wings."
     Second, poetry is useful. It's a tool, like a screwdriver or a hammer. Though I suppose that depends on who you are. If you are Mr. Equanimity, smiling at the clouds as you stroll happily along, your neighbors setting their watches as you pass by, well, maybe the stuff has not much use for you.
     Even then, there are always lighter poets, like Billy Collins, who runs up to the reader waving his poem like a 6-year-old showing off a new toy. "To take a poem/and hold it up to the light/like a color slide/or press an ear against its hive./I say drop a mouse into a poem/and watch him probe his way out."
     Me, being a dark sort, I've been revelling in the poems of Louise Glück, such as "Stars." She inventories her scant world. "I have a bed, a vase/of flowers beside it,/ and a nightlight, a book." Life itself questions her: "Do you dare/send me away as though/you were waiting for something better?/There is no better/Only (for a short space)/the night sky . . ." To which she hisses back: " I was brave, I resisted,/I set myself on fire."
     And third, Chicago is a poetry town. Do you think Wrigley Field, built in 1914, is old? Poetry Magazine was founded here in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, and has fielded better players and enjoyed a better past century.
     Chicago is a city not only with statues to poets such as Goethe, but with an apartment building and a parking garage named for poets. There is the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill on Sundays, now in its 27th year, and why that isn't a standard Chicago tourist stop along with Wrigley and the Art Institute is an utter mystery. There is the Poetry Foundation itself, which put up its airy and attractive building on West Superior to help sop up the Lilly $100 million fortune that drenched it, a dubious boon they've coped with better than expected.
     There is nothing superfluous about good poetry. It guides and instructs. I picked up "Leaves of Grass" a 150-year-old poem, and read one sentence that resonates today.
     "And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy," Walt Whitman writes, "walks to his own funeral, dressed in his shroud."
     That's it, I thought. That's what our political problem is right now. Not enough sympathy —for other people, that is. We overflow with sympathy for ourselves and puzzle that others don't share it, when we are so stingy doling it out. Maybe we should take our cue from Whitman and pause from marching graveward to cast off our blinding burial cloth, force ourselves to feel compassion for the other guy, even if we don't like him. Here poetry helps, or could help, if only we let it.

'She belongs somewhere else'

     I was researching Monday's column and came across this, from a decade ago, and realized it had never been posted on my blog. Which it should be, because it is one of those columns where a simple practical matter—what to do with this woman's ashes?—uncovers a tangled history of human emotion, from the homeless man sneaking into the factory where he once worked to sleep to the currency exchange owner in his tiny bulletproof cell kept company by a dead woman in a shopping bag. Among the odd things I've done in this job—talked to people smoking crack on Lower Wacker Drive, watched a breast lift performed, sat in the back seat of a sheriff's car with a hooker, waiting for her to proposition me—having this lady's urn on the corner of my desk ranks right up there.

     Neva Evans has spent most of the last decade in a Jewel shopping bag tucked away in the cluttered back room at the Ashland-Diversey Currency Exchange.
     Or at least her earthly remains have, ashes in a funerary jar with a mother-of-pearl finish.
     "Good morning, Neva," the owner of the currency exchange, Arnie Berezin, would say as he begins each day at 5 a.m.—which he does, seven days a week, cashing checks and issuing money orders in a tiny alcove decorated with business cards and rolls of coins. A $400 money order costs 85 cents.
     "I'm a nickel-and-dime business," says Berezin, 62. "We don't get rich here."
     The ashes were given to him by a customer, Michael H. Evans, about eight years ago. Mike Evans had worked at Chicago Transparent Products, a nearby plastic bag factory on Paulina. He liked sports, he liked Stephen King novels and he liked beer, but he adored his wife. Then Neva Evans died after an asthma attack.
     "His whole life revolved around his wife, his whole life revolved around his job, in a couple years, first he lost his wife, then he lost his job," says Berezin. "He started drinking heavy and that was the last we saw of him."
     For a while, Evans lived in the old abandoned factory where he once worked —he would sneak in at night to sleep there.
     "Mike Evans was a good guy," says Berezin, choking back tears. "He just never bounced back. The last we heard, he was walking up and down Paulina. He was a lost soul."
     Berezin is the opposite of a lost soul -- he knows exactly who is he and what he does. His parents owned a grocery store on the Southwest Side—he used to work at the store, but they sold it and in May 1973, he bought this currency exchange. The space he spends 13 hours a day behind thick bulletproof glass is maybe two feet deep and six feet across.
     "Cells are bigger," he says. "This is my cell. Some people think I'm crazy, but I put two kids through college."
     He has no employees. Since 1973 the exchange has been closed exactly one day—his father's funeral in 2003.
     He has no hobbies. He never thought about trying to expand.
     "No, I was always comfortable here," he says. "I'm not much of a risk taker."
     Berezin would give Mike Evans $5 or $10 sometimes—not a standard currency exchange practice.
     "I felt heartbroken for him," says Berezin, who calls his customers "kiddo" and tries to help them navigate the economic paperwork they thrust at him through the well-worn metal trough.
     "He cares about a lot of his customers," says Berezin's wife, Sara. "A lot of them depend on him. The economy's bad, some people are really having a hard time. Some can't read, they can't handle money. He tries to help them out."
     One day Mike Evans came in toting a shopping bag. "He said, 'Arnie, could I leave this bag in here?' '' remembers Berezin.
     "I couldn't say 'No' to him. He was a good customer and he was homeless."
     Neva Evans stayed. Mike Evans never came back
     "I always hoped Mike would walk in this door and it never happened," Berezin says. "If he's alive, I'd like to know why he never came back here, because he loved her."
     Over the years, Berezin has called funeral homes, to no avail.
     "I tried everything," he says. "Nobody would take it off my hands."
     But he just couldn't throw the ashes out.
     "It doesn't belong in a Dumpster," he says. "It's a person."
     Lately, he has been worrying about what will happen to Neva.
     "I'm not going to live forever," he says. "This place is not going to be here forever. What's going to happen to that bag? I tell people and they laugh at me, and ask, 'Why don't you toss it away?' Well, what if that was your mother? What if that was your daughter? I just couldn't do that."
     He asks me to take the urn with me, saying, "It doesn't belong here. It belongs somewhere else, with family members or buried. It doesn't belong at the back of a currency exchange. It doesn't belong here."
     As I am leaving, Berezin tears up again, and says goodbye to the urn. I ask if he is certain he really wants me to take it.
     "She doesn't deserve to be on a concrete floor," he says. "She belongs somewhere else, other than here. That's a human being in there."
     I take the ashes home and set them on the corner of my desk, then find out what I can about the woman inside.
     Neva Louise Grace Evans was born in Philadelphia, Miss., on Sept. 4, 1948, to George and Maudine Grace. Her family came to Chicago, and she graduated from Wendell Phillips High School in 1966. She married Michael H. Evans in 1985 and died at the age of 51 on April 9, 2000.
     She had three daughters from a previous marriage—Lisa Grace, of Alpharetta , Ga.; Michelle Grace and Felicia Grace; plus two sisters, Patricia Baker and Iris Heard, and a brother, Dwayne Adams. Any kin are invited to contact me at the newspaper. The earthly remains of Neva Evans will be waiting for you, in a funerary jar with a mother-of-pearl finish.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 11, 2009

I won't leave you hanging. Two days later, I published this:

UPDATE

     Many readers contacted me after Wednesday's story about the sojourn of Neva Evans' ashes at the Ashland-Diversey Currency Exchange. Some knew her and reflected on what a lovely lady she was. Some were funeral home directors, offering a spot for the urn.
     One was Danny Evans, who put me in touch with his brother, Mike Evans, the man who left his wife's remains eight years ago.
     "I did go into hell," he said. "I've lived in shelters. I wasn't in Chicago. I couldn't find a job here for a long time, so I hitchhiked down to South Carolina and Florida. I came back; I'm recently moved in with a girl and have a part-time job. I forgot all about this. I'm sick to my stomach about it. I should have never forgotten about her, but you lose track of pretty much everything . . ."
     That's where we should draw the veil, except to add that I also heard from Neva Evans' sister and her three daughters.
     "No one knew until your article," said daughter Lisa Grace. I'll be handing the urn over to them this morning. "Now she's back with her girls," said Grace.
     Memento homo quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

     That last sentence will require no translation for Catholics, who hear it as ashes are smeared on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday: "Remember O man you are dust, unto dust you shall return."

Egyptian canopic jars, late period. These actually did not contain ashes, but the organs of the deceased,  removed for mummification (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 

Wagner the feminist? "Walküre" a sort of "Thelma & Louise" on the Rhine.

Elisabet Strid

     "I haven't read the synopsis yet," my wife said, as the lights lowered at exactly 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Civic Opera House, an early start for the debut of Wagner's "Die Walküre"
     "Don't worry about the plot, it's nonsense," I said. "Just enjoy the music."
     A moment later, I was about as close as bounce-in-my-seat excited as I ever get. Then again, Sir Andrew Davis had just dug his spurs into the flanks of the Lyric Opera orchestra and it sprang forward into the fluttering, insistent "storm" prelude—if you're not familiar, think a a distant cousin of the pulsing arrival-of-the-shark motif in "Jaws."
     Not that you need Cliff Notes to understand what's going on. There is Sieglinde, sung with power and precision by Swedish soprano Elisabet Strid, making her Lyric debut. She's chained to an enormous ash tree, arching priapically across the stage, yet does her best to be hospitable to a guest, wounded warrior, Siegmund, who, perhaps through his own good breeding—his dad's a god, we discover—never says, "Hey, what's with the big chain?"
     At the end of "Rheingold," the first part of the Ring Cycle, performed at the Lyric last year, Sieglinde was forced to marry the brutish Hunding who — you know, I 'm not going to wander off into the thicket of the plot and lose you. Not just yet anyway. 
    Let's just say that, an hour later, during the first intermission, I quipped. "That was the most elaborate ode to incestuous adultery in musical theater." Or should it be "adulterous incest?" Either way, my wife, always a quick study, explained she knew that Siegmund and Sieglinde were brother and sister when Hunding said he recognized a familiar gleam in his guest's eye. (The names aren't quite the giveaway they seem in print because Siegmund is coy about his name, calling himself "Woeful.")
     Even listening to beautiful music for five hours, the mind tends to wander, and during "Walküre" I found it idly exploring two separate rooms.

Christine Goelke, singing Brunhilde, contemplates her suitors.

     The first was picking out all the mythological story lines either touched upon by or lifted from Wagner—Norse mythology, of course, with its treasure and dwarves ("Walküre" is the second part of Wagner's epic four-part "Ring of the Nibelung," "Nibelung" being a Teutonic word related to either a dwarf or a race of dwarves) Greek mythology (Wotan and Fricka being the Norse version of Zeus and Hera) with some King Arthur (the sword in the stone, er, tree) and even Sleeping Beauty, with all that maiden-awakened-with-a-kiss business. 
    As for stories lifted from Wagner, the Lord of the Rings, of course (the ring, the dwarves) plus aspects of Harry Potter (such as the sword that only showed up in times of duress, and the practical side of the fantastical, like the giants demanding the ring as payment for constructing Valhala, like the most demanding contractors ever) and even Star Wars (the brother and sister hot for each other though, unlike Leia and Luke, realizing the connection stokes the passion of these two instead of quenching it).
     The twins, by the way, belong to Wotan—sung with complex humanity, almost tenderness by bass-baritone Eric Owens—and the second act features him in black tie, in a cool grey deco-ish Valhalla suspended midway between the proscenium arch and the stage. being browbeaten by his wife Fricka (who is hellbent against Siegmund and Sieglinde for their incestuous union—hypocritically since, at least in the Greek version, she herself is both Zeus' wife and sister).  
    Fricka isn't happy about how he's about to come to the aid of Siegmund when he battles Hunding, and wants him to call off Brunhilde and her eight Valkyrie sisters.
    The second act had me thinking—and I think this connection is a first in music criticism—of Henry Winkler, aka "The Fonz." Director Garry Marshall and I once got to talking about his TV show "Happy Days," and he was saying how Winkler was excellent at "laying pipe," aka coming on stage and explaining complicated plot developments in way that wasn't too tortuous on the audience. In Act 2, Wotan gives the back story to how we got this point. 
   After I finished playing Name the Mythic Reference, I wandered into What-is-this-all-about? Yes, yes, a bunch of Nordic (and German and Greek) heroic hooey. But what's it mean?  As the opera progressed, a single revelation came to mind, and I'm going to present it just as it came to me, an admittedly crude epiphany. 
     We were in the 3rd Act act—spoiler alert!—Siegmund's dead, and Sieglinde is fleeing Wotan's wrath. Brunhilde helps her, because, well, she carrying her ... nnn, doing the relationship calculus... bastard half nephew, the future Siegfried. The two women clasp hands, powerfully, and I think: "Oh, this is a chick flick. Or rather, a chick opera." 
    I know that's a stretch, but hear me out. 
   Look who moves the action in "Walküre." In Act 1, Sieglinde escapes her chain (somehow, we don't see it done) drugs her husband Hunding, arms his enemy with some kind of holy sword, and then the two head off for hot Teutonic incest in a springtime wood in winter. No shrinking Madam Butterfly she. 
    In Act 2 Fricka ("Frigga," by the way, in Old Norse, leading to our term "Friday") looking like a 1940s movie goddess, browbeats Wotan into calling off his Valykuries and tacitly allowing the death of his son. He orders Brunhilde to stand down, but she disobeys him, forcing Wotan to deploy his spear and do the deed himself.
     Act 3 opens with the famed "Ride of the Valkyries" set effectively by director David Pountney into a chilling abattoir,  the valkyries in blood-soaked white dresses riding full-size metal horses through the air above slain heroes wheeled around on gurneys by orderlies in bloody aprons and masks, a bracing corrective of field hospital gore to balance all Wagner's war-father nonsense. 
     Then we shift into a kind of Teutonic "Thelma and Louise" as Brunhilde goes completely off reservation, rescues Sieglinde and whisks her to safety. Then, when Wotan shows up to punish his wayward daughter, her sisters form a #MeToo defensive ring around her, brandishing children's chairs, a lovely distaff touch. As Wotan sentences Brunhilde to marriage to whatever dolt of a man can push his hairy way through the ring of flame he sets around her, a motley collection of loutish supernumeraries closes menacingly in. Ugh, men.
     Reader Michele Kurlander, in the Facebook remarks on this post, pointed out one other significant aspect that, perhaps tellingly, I overlooked during the opera: 

Brunhilde wouldn't be at the top of an unscaleable mountain surrounded with a ring of fire so only her juvenile heroic nephew can get in—but instead would be wandering among the hairy dolts, sans Goddess powers, just waiting to be grabbed up—if she hadn't been so clearly smarter and more articulate and more all knowing than her horny Fricka-whipped daddy and almost talked him totally out of punishing her at all! Talk about woman power!

     That too. Wrapping up (the primary drawback to Wagner is that it's just so hard for anybody involved to stop) as I said in the beginning, the plot is best ignored. And really, it's the ... seventh reason you go to a Wagnerian opera, the first seven being, in order of importance: 1) music; 2) voice; 3) acting; 4) scenery; 5) costume; 6) set and 7) the story.
      Edie loved it, by the way, in those words: "I really loved that." Though she missed the horned helmets promised in Bugs Bunny (there is a certain joy in finding expected cliches in a famous work. I explained that for the past few decades directors generally drop the horned, or winged, helmets in order to appear a la mode). As for me, I'm planning to see it again in a couple weeks. Because really: how often do you get the chance? 
   

Impressioni d'Chicago

Sympathy is in short supply and it must be rationed, apparently. So when Columbus Day comes around, lately all we can seem to do is reflect on the undeniable barbarity of Columbus toward the indigenous people he found here, and shrug off the prejudice that Italians faced coming to America, which compelled them to form the holiday in the first place. Which strikes me as wrong. Why should history be divided so neatly into the good and the bad, when there is pity — and blame — enough for all? Since some journalists — no names please! — make such a point of repeatedly rolling in tales of the Mafia and Italian-American criminality, I thought, Monday being Columbus day, it might be a good idea, if only as a change of pace, for the briefest nod at a few of the Chicagoans of Italian extraction who weren't Al Capone or his descendants:

     Giuseppe Giacosa was a playwright who turned to writing opera librettos, penning three Puccini classics — La Boheme, Madam Butterfly and Tosca — before he died at age 49.

     He also traveled and wrote a book, “Impressioni d’America,” visiting Chicago just before the World’s Columbian Exhibition . He was taken, as all visitors were, by the industry, “enormous factories, interminable streets, amazing shops, deafening sounds.”

     And by the smoke.

     “I did not see in Chicago anything but darkness: smoke, clouds, dirt,” he wrote, noticing something unusual for sale, “in many shop windows certain apparatus for covering the nose, a kind of nasal protector, or false nostrils.”

     Chicago is a city that has hosted one wildly overpublicized Italian-American resident — Al Capone — and millions who are underrecognized, from those who spent their entire lives here, to visitors such as Giacosa, who stayed for a week.

     With October being Italian Heritage Month and the Columbus Day Parade on Monday, this seems an apt moment to look at a few of those overlooked Italians.

     Driven from Italy by the extreme poverty there, immigrants to Chicago found the same waiting for them here and had to take the most menial jobs to try to escape it: "street sweepers and pavers, railroad workers . . . bootblacks, barbers, and scissors-grinders" according to historian Bessie Louise Pierce. "Later they might attain the envied status of small merchants and fruit peddlers or seek jobs in the factories."
     They faced such prejudice that L'Italia, Chicago's Italian-language newspaper, published lists of restaurants and hotels they could patronize. Oscar Durante, its vigorous editor, pushed his compatriots to "Americanize" and had a policy where the newspaper would provide any reader an escort to Chicago's naturalization office and pay the 50 cent registration fee.
     Not all were fruit sellers. The founder of the Chicago Pasteur Institute at the Rush Medical College was Dr. Antonio Lagorio, Chicago-born son of Genoese immigrants. Chicago's Italians became successful real estate brokers and restaurateurs, first for their own community and then for a city that grew to love their fare. It's a tradition continued to this day by the likes of Phil Stefani, Joe Mondelli, Steve Lombardo at Gibson's. Tony Durpetti at Gene & Georgetti, the Capitanini family at Italian Village, which Alfredo Capitanini opened in 1927.
     But those are well-known names, and the majority of Chicago's community was unsung.
     "Anonymous heroes of our past who built buildings with the sinew and muscle helped build the great Chicago scene," said Dominic DiFrisco, president emeritus of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans. "Laborers, bricklayers, especially ornamental plasterers of the magnificent theaters in Chicago — 90 percent were Italian. The Italian people enriched and illuminated Chicago in so many ways with labor and intelligence. We're great Americans, yet we continue to honor the past given to us by incredibly courageous people."
     One Italian-American typically overlooked is Florence Scala, who stayed put and fought for her home when most of the Taylor Street Little Italy was being bulldozed in the 1960s for the University of Illinois at Chicago campus.
     It gave her a conflicted view of Chicago, similar to Giacosa's. She told Studs Terkel in Division Street: America that "I've always loved the city . . . I love it and hate it every day. I hate that so much of it is ugly. . . . I hate the fact that so much of it is inhuman in the way we don't pay attention to each other." But mostly she loved it, just as her father did, who came here from Italy and lived to be 98.
     "He never went back to Italy," Scala said. "He didn't want to. He'd say, 'This is my country, America.' "
Photo: sculpture of an early Roman, The Art Institute of Chicago. 10/12/13.

Welcome to my office, belatedly

  
     If I had to summarize the lessons of the Trump era in one sentence, I would say, "The Trump years were a painful lesson in the toxic danger of self-absorption, though many people were too fixated on themselves to notice."
     I'm as guilty as anybody—okay, not as guilty as those willing to scrap our democratic traditions, their own physical well-being and truth itself in service of a monster who whispers sweet nothings in their ears. But still pretty damn self-centered.
     Though I'm aware of it, and try to fight it, and occasionally succeed. I like to think that counts for something.
     For instance, in October, James Finn Garner, leading "Inside for Indies," a laudable effort to drive folks to independent bookstores for the holidays, asked me to give a tour of my home office. He didn't have to ask twice (well, okay, he did, but that was more from disorganization and delay than reluctance. I was glad to do it, eventually). There is something enticing about showing off your space. I definitely remember being in 7th grade, navigating the difficulties of Roehm Junior High School, and there being a hip young teacher, Miss Jones, a big 1973 afro, and I remember thinking, "If only Miss Jones could see my bedroom, she'd understand."
     Anyway, I showed off my office, in a video I shot myself, and the result was suitably low production value that I didn't see need to share it beyond the leaf-in-the-wind of Twitter and the raise-a-finger-and-clear-your-throat-in-a-riot of Facebook. Leading, after only 10 weeks, to a grand total of 177 views on Facebook, which give you an idea of the kind of small ball I'm playing here. Frankly, I was glad not too many people saw it, between my skipping the punchline in the 55-word story I read (the title is "Published") to my godawful attempt to read a Louise Glück poem.
     But a regular reader objected. A while back, and again this past week, Jakash writes:

     I asked about this once and you replied that you were considering it. I'll ask one more time and then never mention it again.
     Half of the commenters to your EGD post yesterday remarked about the photos of your old S-T office which accompanied it. (I was one of them, but still...)
     I think they, and certainly some other folks, would be interested to see that video of your home (and months-long primary) office that you filmed for that independent-bookstore supporting online series a while back. Maybe you don't agree, or maybe you have another reason for not wanting to post it. Which is fine, needless to say.

     Aw heck, if it's important to you, sure. So, with apologies in advance, you want me nattering on about books and writing in my home office for a dozen minutes, you can find it here.

Life gives, and then...

     Kanye West ran a two-page advertisement in the New York Times Friday, with a dove on the left hand page and some kind of letter about hope and peace on the right. I read it, wondering if it was some kind of plug for Trump, but it was just gibberish—the general consensus is it has something to do with his supposed presidential campaign. But how it helps West, I cannot say.
     "This must have set him back" I said to my wife.
     This pointless indulgence reminded me of an advertisement I'd seen in the Gray Lady and taken a photo of a few weeks previous: the one that ran after Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize in literature. Here, take a look and tell me if what stood out to me stands out for you:

     I mean, really, could they make the ad any smaller? I took out a ruler and measured: 1/12th of a page, or 1/24th of the ad Kanye West took out for no particular purpose.

     It isn't as if her publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is a marginal operation. It's a division of Macmillan Publishers, which is part of the gigantic Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, with some $2 billion in annual revenues, making it an even bigger deal than Kanye West, if such as thing is possible.

     I know publishing is on hard times. But still, it isn't as if they hand out the Nobel Prize in Literature every day. The FS&G folks couldn't have heard the news and thought, "Again?! Now we'll have to run another congratulatory ad!" Would a quarter page have wrecked their budget?

     I can't speak for Glück—maybe being a superlative poet puts you beyond such things. But I've read all of her poetry, and she is a very grounded, practical, table-and-chair kind of poet. I can see her scanning the paper for her ad, sighing, looking around as if to find an audience, and saying, "Really?" 

     Though immediately smiling then, because one doesn't succeed as a poet without learning that the world, she has her little jokes, and there is no rose without thorns, no honor given without mitigation, sometimes enough to counterbalance the honor itself, and then some. Life gives, and then takes away. That's the essence of poetry right there.

Flashback 2006: George Dunne — Scandals couldn't dent charm of board president

George Dunne, foreground and Mayor Richard J. Daley, at 1968 Democratic National Convention.

     "Very nice," reader Dave Bahnsen commented on my 2010 obituary of Dan Rostenkowski. "Now do George Dunne." 

     Welllll...on the one hand, I'm not a lounge singer or a short-order cook. I don't do requests. However, this is Sunday, and while I have indeed written something new, it can wait. I'll need something Tuesday as well (Monday is my fire hydrant magnus opus).

     "Okay," I replied.

     As it happens, I did write the obit for the longtime Cook County Board president. If I had to grade this one, I'd give it a B minus. That "epic" in the beginning of the fourth graph is unfortunate. Its averageness is probably why I didn't post the piece before. I left out some key points — I must have been hurried. I buried the sex scandal that ended his career, and left out the frat brother admiration some of his fellow hacks said in public without shame. The obit also doesn't mention that Dunne personally banned abortions at Cook County Hospital in 1980, even though — as he later admitted — he lacked the authority to do so. Which didn't stop him from sometimes approving the procedure, on an ad hoc basis, when he felt the situation demanded it. "Sometimes he said yes, and sometimes he said no," a source told the Sun-Times in 1992. I'm not sure why I overlooked it — I hope because, in the rush to get the obit written, I just didn't know. It's an important historical fact to bear in mind, a reminder that while when the decision whether or not to have an abortion is denied the woman most affected, a decision is still being made, by an unseen man.

     George W. Dunne, for years among the most powerful cogs in the once-mighty Chicago Democratic Machine who worked his way up from playlot supervisor to Cook County Board president and heir-apparent to Richard J. Daley, died Sunday afternoon.
     Mr. Dunne died at his farm in Hebron, near the Wisconsin border, according to his wife of 16 years, Claudia Dunne. He was 93 and had been suffering heart trouble, she said.
     "I said, 'Just let go. I'll be fine,' " his wife said. "And he did."
     During his epic career, Dunne was Chicago Park District assistant general superintendent, Democratic Central Committee chairman, and longtime committeeman of the 42nd Ward — serving in many capacities simultaneously.
     In his nearly 22 years as board president, Dunne supervised $1 billion in construction of county buildings and was embroiled in a variety of controversies over Cook County Hospital and the County Jail.
     Through it all, he was a smooth politician and a charming man. Scandals that would have shattered the careers of lesser politicians simply rolled off Dunne, at least until toward the end of his long reign.
     "George Dunne was a friend and a respected, charismatic leader who spent a lifetime in public service," Mayor Daley said Monday. "Our heartfelt prayers and condolences go out to his family."
     Park District playlot manager
     George William Dunne was born Feb. 20, 1913, in the Near North Side's 42nd Ward, one of eight children of John and Ellen Dunne. His father, sexton of Holy Name Cathedral for 33 years, died when George was 12.
     He graduated from De La Salle Institute and attended Northwestern University for a year but dropped out. He caught the eye of the Democratic Party organization and snared a job as manager of a Park District playlot.
     During World War II, he served in Europe and in the Pacific from November 1942 to April 1946. He was recalled to active duty for the Korean War and served from April 1951 to September 1952.
     Back home, state Sen. William "Botchy'' Connors, the 42nd Ward Democratic committeeman, tapped him to fill a vacancy in the Legislature in 1955.
    After eight years in the Legislature, Mr. Dunne became Democratic floor leader. Then Mayor Richard J. Daley tapped him for the County Board, where he quickly rose to lead the powerful Finance Committee.
     When Connors died in 1961, the ward committeemanship passed to Mr. Dunne, along with the lucrative ward insurance business. Mr. Dunne's Near North Insurance Agency, formed in 1962, later collapsed in a scandal while under the control of Dunne's partner, Michael Segal, who was convicted in 2004 of looting $30 million from the firm.
     When the Metropolitan Fair and Exposition Authority — whose chairman was appointed by Daley — wanted to insure the new McCormick Place in 1968, it did not take bids but handed the contract directly to Mr. Dunne, who pocketed between $15,000 and $20,000 in annual commissions from that one policy alone.
     Like any good ward committeeman, Mr. Dunne held court, granting favors to his constituents, finding jobs and clouting. But those jobs and favors came with a price tag: Not only ringing doorbells and hustling votes on Election Day, but raising money. Mr. Dunne was proud of the patronage system.
     "I've been in government for a long time, and I can't see any concrete evidence of the merit system resulting in more efficient government,'' he said after being elected president of the Cook County Board in January 1969.
The logical Daley heir?
     Mr. Dunne was a delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention. There, he was seen on television next to Richard J. Daley while the mayor jeered Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut for decrying violence in the streets of Chicago.
     For more than 21 years, Mr. Dunne controlled Cook County, the second-most-populous county in the nation with 54 agencies and departments and a budget of more than $150 million.
     Mr. Dunne established himself as a cost-cutter. But despite his loyalty to the mighty Democratic Machine, outside forces began to crack it. In 1972, the Shakman decree ended the practice of coercing government workers to make contributions and do political work.
     Toward the end of Daley's life, it was assumed that Mr. Dunne was "the logical Daley heir.'' Mr. Dunne was at the height of his power, a large, handsome man who had a face that had "aged gracefully and a head of gray hair cut so well and so often that one suspected it actually never grew at all,'' as he was described by one historian.
     But the mid-1970s were also a difficult time for Mr. Dunne. In fall of 1971, Mr. Dunne was in hot water when a Daily News story said government officials had bought racetrack stock on the basis of information and sold it at enormous profit. The venture was the same deal that sent former Gov. Otto Kerner to prison. But Mr. Dunne was spared because he had no public duties connected to the racing industry.
     In 1972, the Better Government Association accused Mr. Dunne of holding stock in two banks receiving interest-free county money, and that the banks had given Mr. Dunne huge loans. Mr. Dunne sold his stock and resigned his directorship at one of the banks.
     The next year, Mr. Dunne was accused of making lucrative investments in luxury high-rises built by a Chicago contractor who received millions in county contracts. He did not deny the charges.
'Very smart in every way'
     After Daley died in December 1976, Mr. Dunne seized the chair of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee. His first act was to unceremoniously dump Jane Byrne as co-chair and disband the Democratic Women's Group.
     "Dunne obviously cared little for women politicians,'' Byrne said in her memoirs.
     On Monday, Byrne remembered Dunne as "very smart in every way."
     Mr. Dunne threw himself and the then-faltering Machine behind the luckless Mayor Michael Bilandic. But Byrne upset Bilandic in the 1979 primary, and in March 1982, Mayor Byrne ousted Mr. Dunne as chairman of the Democratic Central Committee.
     With his future in a Byrne administration bleak, Mr. Dunne threw his support to Harold Washington. He was one of the few Machine pols to do so, and battled old-timers' horror at the prospect of a black mayor.
     "The party had better get used to the idea . . . and get behind Washington's candidacy,'' Mr. Dunne told party regulars. He also played a decisive role in the Council's election of Eugene Sawyer as mayor after Washington's death.
     The wheels finally began to come off Mr. Dunne's career in 1988, when WMAQ-Channel 5 reported on two female Cook County Forest Preserve female employees who said they were forced to have sex with Mr. Dunne to get hired and gain promotions. Encounters with the women, described as lesbians, happened at Dunne's farm in Hebron.
     Mr. Dunne, whose first wife, Agnes, had died in 1980, was 75 at the time. He admitted having sex with the women and acknowledged "extremely poor judgment.''
     He did not run for a sixth term as board president in 1990.
     Mr. Dunne did continue as committeeman of the 42nd Ward until 2003, when he stepped down at 90 after holding the post for 42 years.
     "His personality was always marked by charm and good manners. The good deeds he performed for so many are the best commentary on his long and worthy life," said Ald. Ed Burke (14th).
     Besides his wife, survivors include two daughters, Mary Louise Morrisseau and Eileen Dunne Zell, a son, Murphy Dunne; five grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.
     Visitation will be 6 p.m. Wednesday at Holy Name Cathedral. A prayer service led by Cardinal Francis George will follow at 7:30 p.m. On Thursday morning, a funeral mass will be said at Holy Name.

                — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 30, 2006