Danish notes #1: Spiral city

 

Church of Our Savior, Copenhagen

     "Leitmotif" originated as a German word, used by critics picking apart the works of Richard Wagner. A fitting term to start my reflection on Copenhagen, as Danish is a Germanic language. It means, roughly, a recurrent theme, and in the case of our recent visit to the capital of Denmark, the theme we kept returning to was, of all things, spirals.

Eliasson bridge

    The overture began hours after we landed, with an enigmatic tower glimpsed from the canal tour my wife cannily put us on, in the sound theory that we'd been traveling all day and would need some low energy activity to introduce us to the city. It worked. We saw all sorts of wonderful sights — a bridge designed by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson that looks like a sailing ship and collapses in on itself to let boats pass. The Rem Koolhaas-designed Danish Architecture Center, which I immediately tweeted at Lee Bey ("EAT YOUR HEART OUT!" I wrote, having decided years ago it is hysterical to taunt Lee, our architecture critic, when I see noteworthy architecture abroad. I can't hope he finds it as funny as I do; but he hasn't asked me to stop, which I take as license to continue). We even locked eyes on the backside of the Little Mermaid statue, sparing us the need to carve out time and face the throng for the obligatory visit.
     Above all, the Church of Our Savior, whose spiral steeple is unlike anything I've ever seen atop a building. Gold and black, we could see tiny figures working their way up the staircase. I wanted to be one of them.

Dragon Spire

     Moments later, we cruised past a second spiral steeple, the Dragon Spire atop the Old Stock Exchange, hove into view, evoking my favorite German saying, Einmal ist keinmal und zweimal ist immer, or "Once is never but twice is always."

     I noticed a trend, but did not expect a third spiral. The next day, however, we were wandering away from the Rosenborg Castle — delightfully downmarket, compared to palaces in Paris and Madrid — and happened upon the Rundetaarn, or Round Tower. We were looking for a particular marketplace, to lunch on their brand of open-faced sandwiches, and I figured atop the tower would be a good vantage point to eyeball it. 

     Don't let the bust of Tycho Brahe outside the tower fool you — the Danish astronomer died in 1601, in exile in Prague, while the Round Tower wasn't completed until 1642.

     The tower has no stairs, but a spiral path  winding seven and a half times around the building, the way the tower of Babylon is depicted. We paid our eight Euros and marched gamely upward. 

     "What's with Copenhagen and spirals?" I typed into Google, expecting all sorts of sites rhapsodizing bout Spiral City. Nothing. A lot about Church of Our Savior.  And that's about it. Nobody seemed to have made the connection before. 

Path up the Round Tower

     So the field is open to me. Readers might remember how in 2015 I used four shapes as a lens to view Chicago — the parabola, the circle, the square, the triangle. A spiral is the perfect representation a city, which also unwinds out from a central point over time — in "The Wizard of Oz," remember, Dorothy starts skipping along a spiraling Yellow Brick Road that leads her to the Emerald City. 

     The Round Tower went up in 1642. The Church of Our Savior spire was added in 1759. So I assumed the former inspired the latter. Not so. The Church of Our Savior website says it is based on the Church of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome, and I have no reason to doubt them.

     Those are the only two spiral church towers in the world I could find, which is odd, because spirals are an omnipresent natural design form, from starfish to galaxies. They've been used in architecture since Greek times — the capital of an Ionic column has a pair of spirals. Trajan's Column in Rome, built over 2,000 years ago, still has its spiral staircase inside. Modern buildings use them — Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim comes to mind (though honestly, as a museum warrior, I'm no fan of that ramp). 

    I started to see them elsewhere in Copenhagen, pausing in the middle of the street to snap this spiraling brick chimney, the likes of which I've never seen before.

The Treetop Experience

    The Danes are still twirling. In 2019, a 148-foot-tall spiral ramp the Treetop Experience opened in Gisselfeld Klosters Skove,, a forest an hour south of Copenhagen. The structure is 12 loops around a hyperboloid, for you geometry geeks (an hourglass shape for everybody else) offering visitors a treetop view of the surrounding area. I didn't visit; next time (kidding; there never is a next time).

     My wife wanted to go to Christiana, the hippie commune turned tourist attraction, and I cut short her consultation with bus schedules by suggesting we bike there. 

    On the way, we saw the Church of Our Savior, first in the distance, then looming before us. Turns out, the church is a block from an entrance to Christiana. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. We parked our bikes at the church, and after wandering about Christiana, enjoying an ice coffee, we went up the spire, which, rather than opening out on an observation deck, basically got narrower and narrower until you were jammed into an endpoint below the giant golden ball. It was not something pleasurable to do, but definitely something worth having done.

Fence around the Church of Our Savior.

Ohio back in the fight

Berea Triangle, postcard circa 1960.

     There's a line in the Pete Townshend song "White City Fighting" that crosses my mind every time I find myself back in my hometown of Berea, Ohio. Standing in its little downtown triangle featuring one monument to the Bereans who fell in the Civil War and another to the USS Maine, blown up in Havana harbor in 1898, helping spark the Spanish-American War, made of steel recovered from the doomed battleship.
     "I couldn't wait to get out, but I love to go home."
     That's true. To pass the familiar stores — and the increasing mix of unfamiliar ones. To mark the spots where something once stood — here was the Berea movie theater, with its green and yellow marque. Here was Southwest General Hospital, now a nursing home. This was Wallace Lake, now a silted in, half muddy field, half swamp.
     Meatloaf's "Bat out of Hell" came out when I was a senior at Berea High School, and as much as I loved the MetroParks, running a few blocks from my house, and the bone deep block by block, almost foot by foot familiarity that comes from growing up in a place, I just knew that my life, whatever it would be, would not unfold here.  Eighteen years and out.

     "And maybe I'm damned if I never get out, and maybe I'm damned if I do..."
     Not that the departure was without melancholy. I remember, the summer before I left for college, standing in the dry cleaner's — there was only one — and rotating the little metal rack with all the yellow tickets and reading the last names, the Campbells, the Cherrys, the Corenos. I knew them all, and I realized, with a certain indelible sadness, that I would never again be in a place where that would be true. 
     I wasn't attuned to Ohio politics beyond what I gleaned from my mother being a member of the League of Women Voters — the name itself vibrating with 19th century idealism. The mayor of Cleveland was the homunculus Dennis Kucinich — he's still on the political scene, a member of the shabby crew of third-rate failures surrounding Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His wife Sandi was a teacher at our high school, and he showed up before the performance of "The Wizard of Oz" and I noticed that students, teenagers, were turning away and busying themselves with makeup and such rather than notice him and shake his hand.

     But I thought of Ohio as a fairly down-to-earth place. We made stuff — in US Steel, the Ford Plant and the Chevy Plant, Youngstown and Lordstown. Glidden, General Electric, and Goodyear in Akron. Ohians farmed, and fed the world. So yes, we had Republicans, naturally, but they were of the Robert Taft Jr. variety — our senator. I still have the letter that my class at Fairwood School received from him after we sent letters expressing our concern about pollution "It is admirable that so many young people are concerned about this problem," the grandson of President William Howard Taft wrote.
    That was back long before the the Republican Party had swapped business for fantasy and become a cult, dancing around the golden calf of Donald Trump, buffing his statue with their long hair. Now a Republican star, Ron DeSantis, can declare war on one of Florida's largest employers, Disney, basically over a few press releases, and nobody bats an eye. Crazy is the new normal.
     Now the junior senator from Ohio is the loathsome piece of shit named J.D. Vance, who parlayed "Hillbilly Elegy," his book celebrating Appalachian poverty, into election to the senate. Cosplaying as a regular working person, the hedge fund investor became the first Ohio senator to take office with zero government experience. The graduate of Yale Law School at first saw Donald Trump clearly enough, expressing valid concerns that "he might be America's Hitler." Then he smelled personal advantage, and got in line for the proto-fuehrer's benediction. "The best president in my lifetime," Vance gushed, while Trump ridiculed him. "J.D. is kissing my ass he wants my support so much,” Trump sneered, before giving it, lowering his ring to waist level for Vance to smooch. And he did. And does.
     It saddened me that my home state could slide into nationalistic fervor. Ohio seemed so grounded in practicality — home to eight presidents, the aforementioned Taft plus William Henry Harrison, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley and Warren G. Harding. Not exactly an honor roll of excellence. But more commanders in chief than any other state, and not a radical among them. Warren G. Harding, long considered a nadir of corruption and cronyism, was Cincinnatus compared to the 45th president. 
     But maybe the days of Ohio as a bastion of stability and decency are not forever lost. Hope flickered anew Tuesday, with Ohio's referendum on whether the citizens could mute their ability to amend the constitution — a Republican ploy to game the system, and prevent voters from controlling their lives, trying to keep Ohio from following other states in enshrining women's reproductive rights constitutionally.  A referendum would move the vote needed to amend the constitution from 50 to 60 percent. Beyond the reach of the current divide.

      About 57 percent of Ohio voters said, "No, we'd like to keep our ability to decide how we live our lives." Some 43 percent voted to have that power taken away (Good thing they have those notional babies they can pretend to be saving, because otherwise, I'd think they're just hot to meddle in the sexual choices of women they've never met).

       My general relief that the totalitarian charge might be turned away was mixed with nostalgic pride. “You can fool all of the people some of the time," begins a popular 19th century saying variously attributed to Abraham Lincoln or P.T Barnum. "You can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.”
     Ohioans, having been fooled for a while — they threw their support behind Trump twice — seem to be moving from the second to the third category. Whether they stay there, and whether the rest of the nation follows them, is an open question. But it is good to see Ohio back in the fight, on the side of the good guys once again.

Works in progress: Lane J. Lubell, "Three Thoughts on the Oscars"

     This week's guest writer is someone special. I have known Lane Lubell his entire life — his parents, Larry and Ilene, are longtime family friends; my wife went to high school with Larry. I've watched Lane, a little younger than my older son, grow into that rarest of individuals: someone you can have an intelligent conversation with. We talk about books. I recently read a fascinating Harlem renaissance detective novel, Rudolph Fisher's 1932 "The Conjure-Man Dies," based on his recommendation. We talk about the arts, particularly movies. He studied film at Northwestern, knows of what he speaks, and as a teacher, also knows how to convey it. With the Academy Awards Sunday, I invited him to write something to share here, and he did not disappoint. Take it away, Lane:

     Thanks for the invite, Neil. I’m honored to contribute. For clarity’s sake, I have decided to split my thoughts into three sections.

Part I: Predicting the Oscars   

     I love predicting the Oscars, but that doesn’t mean I care about them. I couldn’t care less about what designer Ana de Armas may be wearing or whether some talented hunk brings his mom as his date. I have never paid any attention to the red carpet and I never will. Similarly, every ceremony has been disappointing since Seth MacFarlane’s controversial hosting duty. Moreover, I regularly disagree with two-thirds of the Academy’s decisions. And that’s okay. 

     For me, predicting the Academy awards has the appeal of tracking on-base averages. Like baseball stats or March Madness brackets, the fun is in predicting — looking at results from the cavalcade of previous local awards & fests and their respective correlation percentages to prior ceremonies, tracking Academy membership, averaging the predictions of others (GoldDerby serving wonderfully to this end), and determining the impact of box office numbers and a movies’ mass appeal. It’s a nearly scientific endeavor. Last year, I managed a rare perfect score at the ceremony, (a victory overshadowed by ”The Slap”).

     However, I’m not going to talk about my predictions. (If Neil is feeling generous, he’ll link you to them here). Instead, I’m going to tell you the good news. 

Part II: The Academy Sells Out…in a Good Way 

     Back in August and September, Sarah Polley’s "Women Talking" was the mathematical front runner for the top prize. I hadn’t seen it yet, so I went along with the stats. Now, I have.

     For those of you who haven’t seen it (which you probably haven’t because Orion, the film’s distributor, is clearly at a loss as to its promotion), the film is effectively a Socratic dialogue in a barn with sad Mennonite women debating whether they should or should not leave their sexually-assaultive community; Polley puts theme and message before character in this “should-have-been-play” tale. However, I know why people believed it would win. It’s “important.”

     For the past 25 years or so, the Academy has been … pretentious. Movies that fill seats get passed over like they have lamb’s blood above their doors. Anything without systemic social injustice and grit get hidden under the bed before mom comes in to check on you. Sometimes, you need to put your toys away, but other times, you want to see the toys on the floor; it means your kid is having fun. Instead, they’re reading with Dostoevsky and Ta-Nehisi Coates. I don’t mean to downplay the importance of the work, but we go to the movies to have fun. 

     Oscar viewership is down significantly. Many blamed the rise of the cable-cutters and media diversification for these woes; others point the finger at a generation less interested in the pomp of celebrity, while some argue that they just haven’t had the right hosts. While I agree that all of those factors could affect tune-ins (certainly, Kimmel’s return will not help), these pundits miss King Kong in the room. People aren’t watching the ceremony because they don’t have a vested interest. They have had little to root for. There was a time, not long ago, when nominated films were widely seen. Look at ‘94. "The Shawshank Redemption,"  "Forrest Gump," "Quiz Show," "Four Weddings and a Funeral," and "Pulp Fiction." Now, we have Andrea Riseborough (an actress you’ve seen many times but can’t quite place) nominated for "To Leslie," a film with a box office gross less than a private school tuition. How can you root for or against Riseborough? You haven’t seen her performance. No one has!    

     By only calling self-serious indies the industry’s best, voters alienate their viewers. Only a select few try to see all the nominees. “You love Marvel movies. Is it Black Panther related? No? Then it’s crap that we will never give a major nomination.” (To date, "Joker" and "Black Panther" are the only superhero films nominated for best picture, while "Joker" and "Logan" are the only two to receive writing nominations (which "Logan" should have won). Last year’s humiliating attempt to let Twitter choose the film of the year (the four hour reedited garbage fire, Zack Snyder’s "Justice League") to pacify these criticisms only made matters worse. 

     But here’s the good news. This year, things have changed. For once, the front runner is a box office success, making over $100 million. "Everything Everywhere All at Once' is one of the most imaginative and inventive films ever made, but it’s also a lot of fun. If it wins, it will be the first ever action comedy to do so, despite it being the most popular genre of the 21st century. It would also become only the third ever fantasy film to claim the title following "Lord of the Rings Return of King' (2003) and the hybrid period romance, "The Shape of Water" (2017). 

     Moreover, in what is likely the 3rd spot flies "Top Gun: Maverick," 2022’s highest grosser and arguably the best straight action movie since "Mad Max: Fury Road." Even James Cameron’s just fine "Avatar" sequel (which somehow grossed $2 billion) made it in. This year, it seems the Academy is starting to remember why people love movies in the first place. 

Part III: Screw you, F#¢% 

    

    Finally, I want to congratulate the Academy for saying “screw you” to F#¢%. And yes, the grawlix (the use of non-alphabetical characters in place of letters in profanity) have a purpose. 

     For the first time in a decade, the majority of the best picture nominees are not rated R. Only "All Quiet on the Western Front," "Everything Everywhere All at Once," "The Banshees of Inisherin," and "Triangle of Sadness" have R ratings. And best of all, each of them deserve their ratings. "Banshees" desperately needs its profanity, "Triangle" needs its nudity, "All Quiet" needs its brutality, and "Everything "needs its … I’m a middle school teacher so let’s just say, paraphernalia. Meanwhile, Polley and Tár’s Todd Field have been able to tell difficult stories of sexual misconduct with PG-13s, proving that you don’t need to pack your movie with graphic violence or frontal nudity to be taken seriously or tackle difficult subjects. 

     Indeed, over the past five years, 64% of best picture nominees were rated R, with 36% receiving a lower rating. Moreover, an R rated film won every year between 2006-2017 save 2011’s pick, "The Artist." This year, 60% are rated PG-13. These numbers represent a marked improvement that I hope to see continue. But, let’s add some G and PG to that list.  

     Thanks, Neil. Back to you!

How to honor the COVID dead?

Stephen Blackwelder, conductor of the DePaul Community Chorus. Also onstage is the       
                    Oistrakh Symphony of Chicago, which plays with the chorus.

     Should we honor the COVID dead?
     The current tally for the United States is 972,000 and climbing by 1,200 a day. At this rate, we’ll hit 1 million Americans dead of COVID-19 sometime in mid-April.
     Do we memorialize the fallen? And if so, how?
     Uncomfortable questions. Americans are used to solemnizing those who die in wars. They have their own day. (Sigh. It’s Memorial Day.) And while some Americans visit graves, in general the holiday is marked with ball games, blowout sales and potato salad.
     Some countries have national moments of silence. I’ve been in Israel during their Memorial Day, Yom HaZikaron, and at the appointed moment people stop driving and stand outside their cars, heads bowed, for a two-minute moment of silence.
     Silence is not a very American concept. We’re more into physical monuments. My hometown had a statue to a Union soldier on a plinth in its downtown triangle, a silent sentinel that I never associated with anyone dying until now.
     The World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., is a sprawl of low walls and stumpy columns and burbling pools that I would be hard-pressed to envision in my mind’s eye, and I was there. More a fancy marble skatepark than a memorial.
     The gold standard for war memorials is Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a black granite gash in the earth with the names of the 58,000 American military who died in that brutal, grinding war.
     Should we try to do something similar for the COVID million, victims of another conflict that divided our country? Hard to imagine. Maybe there is an artist or architect who can put the plague years into meaningful shape and mold public perceptions as Maya Lin did.

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"Remember the Maine!"

 

     Many communities have a square, a little park at the center of their downtown. My hometown, Berea, Ohio has a triangle, aptly called "The Triangle," and I was strolling around it with the friends we were visiting in May, on our way out to Virginia for our younger son's graduation.     
    "Wait a minute," I said, breaking away from our group. "I want to go look at that plaque made out of a piece of the Maine."
     I hadn't seen it in a decade or two, but I knew it was there, somewhere. It took a bit of searching. For an uneasy moment I thought it had been carted away. Not every tribute that is taken down is done so because it's become offensive; some just are irrelevant. 

     But there it was, an actual memento, cast from a piece of the ship that blew up in Havana Harbor on Feb. 15, 1898. That fact must have impressed me as a child and stuck in mind. "Cast from metal recovered from the USS Maine," it says on the plaque, the way after 9/11 pieces of the Twin Towers were worked into memorials. 

     It was a similar attack, maybe, with a considerable loss of life. The USS Maine sank with a loss of most of its crew. Hit by a mine, it was believed at the time, and the sinking was cast as provocation and atrocity and blamed on the Spanish, who were trying to put down a Cuban independence movement. "Remember the Maine!" became a rallying cry, and the U.S. entered into one of its more lopsided imperialist wars.

     I pass it along as a reminder that monuments do, in fact, influence us. I know what the Maine was, not because of any history class, but because of this green oxidized slab of bronze that I passed regularly for the first 18 years of my life. The memorial doesn't mean I particularly venerate the Maine—some historians suspect it was blown up, not by a Spanish mine, but through some ineptness in the management of the ship's engines and coal supplies. I could see that. My concern was nostalgic, not historic. Some U.S. history books never even mention the Maine, and probably just as well. You can't remember everything.

     Though there is a value to the story. The moral of the Maine sinking is to remember the dubious excuses we use for going to war—like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or the weapons of mass destruction that weren't there. They seem so important at the time. But they're really not. We say we remember them, and we do, for a time. Then we forget and move on.

Maybe "Lift Up the Wronged Garden"....

     Art gets a bad rap. Ponderous, often. Incomprehensible, or else too apparent. Trivial, derivative, unskilled—the list of flaws goes on and on.
     But art has its place.
     My hometown of Berea, Ohio, is looking good. And we wandered the downtown, where children played and adults relaxed amidst the gazebos, playgrounds and walkways. We headed to the Triangle to assure myself that the plaque to the U.S.S. Maine was still there—I think figuring out what the "Maine" might have been kicked off my lifelong habit of learning about history. We even strolled into the MetroPark, which looked lush and lovely.
     So it is perhaps unfair for me to focus on this little tableau by Coe Lake. The Victims of Crime Memorial Garden.
     But it bothered me, in previous visits, and bothered me again Wednesday. More so because I couldn't put my finger on what the trouble is. That it's a downer? No, bad stuff happens, and it helps to memorialize it. That it passes itself off as a "garden" though has no flowers that I noticed? I didn't think of that until later, puzzled as to what the problem is.
     It finally came to me: artless. "Victims of Crime Memorial Garden." You can't get more direct than that. It's like an urban planner's note scrawled on a city map denoting where the victims of crime memorial garden will go when the proper poetic sorts figure out how to create a fitting tribute that is soothing and appropriate. Only nobody ever did, and through some awful miscommunication the dashed off scrawl became the name of the thing.
     And don't get me started on that grindstone. Yes, Berea was the Sandstone Capitol of the World. And yes, there are a lot of them still scattered around, with every august house sporting one in the garden. And yes, we are proud.
     But did anyone consider the optics of using a grindstone to announce the garden where those ground down by having their loved ones fall to crime seek refuge and comfort? (If indeed it is intended for them. By it's name, it might just be done on behalf of the dead, and we living don't factor into the equation. That would explain a lot).
     Did they consider they were pushing a grindstone under the nose of the ground down? Or at best offering up a historical non sequitur to safe suburban sorts untouched by a whisper of crime as they are reminded that upon an unfortunate few falls the shadow? The optics of that? Perhaps that is what the little garden statuary angel was stuck there to counterbalance, but the poor cherub just isn't up to the task.
     As my wife and I drove east, after a lovely night with our friends, three types of homemade pizza and two types of homemade ice cream—we Ohioans know how to host company—she mentioned in passing the one thing that had bugged her. "The victims garden?" I replied. Bingo. I asked her why. She wasn't bothered by the name so much as the typography.
     "Stark," she said. She had a point. All caps, like something off a bowling trophy. Here a few flourishes and curlicues might have gone a long way. 

     Not that figuring out a proper name is easy. Just as when I criticize a headline, I make myself come up with a better one, on the road the next day I tried to come up with a better one. "Victims: is reductive, like "slaves." It implies that's all they were. "Enslaved people" jars in its own way, I but I get what they're driving at.  Maybe "violence" instead of crime, since I'm assuming it isn't intended for those who cope with graft. "Comfort Those Touched by Violence Garden" seems a start. I'll welcome suggestions—800 miles driven in two days, it takes a toll on the creative abilities.

     So my intention isn't to criticize the Berea civic types who took the minimal time, least effort and lowest possible expense to put this together. Yes, they tried. But c'mon guys, rise to the occasion next time. There is nothing wrong with comforting the bereaved or remembering the fallen. But if you're going to do it, do it right.

Patronize the Creative Clock Service Center

     Suburban Clock and Repair has been on Front Street in Berea, Ohio since long before I was born: 1953, to be exact. Growing up the clock shop, as we called it, was a place of wonder, for its fat antique Elgin pocket watches, and the enormous German cuckoo clock that the owner was constructing in the basement.
     When my parents left Berea for Boulder, Colorado, my mother bought me a beautiful Hermle mantle clock that I had my eye on for years, for its deco numerals and sloped wooden beauty. The transaction has an almost mythic place in my memory, as there was no drama, no wheedling, no mitigation of any kind. She bought it for me because I wanted it,  as a we're-leaving present, as a souvenir of my home town and I suppose a kind of solace.
    For 30 years it has sat somewhere in my house, on my mantle in the city, when we had a mantle, on Logan Boulevard and Pine Grove Avenue, or on the Shaker hutch in our dining room in Northbrook. Sometimes I have it set to peal the quarter hour, sometimes not, according to my whim.  Once a week I wind it.
     A few decades ago, the clock mechanism gave up the ghost, and I had it replaced by the Chicago Clock Shop in Palatine. I know this because of a sticker they placed inside, the smallest advertisement ever.
     Eventually, there was a mishap: the tiny circular nut that holds on the hands managed to fall off in such a way that it was lost. My theory is that it fell into the round face glass, then made its break for freedom when I opened the glass to wind the clock, not noticing. It vanished, going to wherever tiny round nuts go when they don't want to be found. 
     The nut wasn't vital. The hands stayed on. Mostly, but perhaps gently vibrated by our footfalls, or passing trains, the hands would eventually shiver off, and collect in the bottom of the front glass. Dynamic action on my part seemed required. 
     I started by calling Chicago Clock. I tried to make the job easy for them, by first going online and figuring out exactly what kind of clock I have—a Hermle Stepney mechanical tambour mantel clock (a tambour is a round embroidery frame, and must refer to the circular glass face of the clock, which swings open for winding). I told Chicago Clock that I'm looking for the tiny brass serrated hand nut that holds the hands on.
    "We have those," the man on the other end said.
     Success! God, this was easy.
     "Great," I said. "I would like to buy one and have you mail it to me."
     "We don't send parts through the mail."
     Ah. A complication. "Why?" I asked.
     "We've had a bad experience sending parts through the mail."
     And I've had bad experiences writing stuff, but I still do it.
     He gave the impression that he had a box filled with such parts, and would just give the nut to me, but I would have to show up and get it. In Palatine. A half hour drive. Not bad. Sixty minute round trip. It would be an outing. I could take the clock with me, strapped into the back seat, to get it eyeballed while I was at it.
     But something grated. They should be able to mail the nut to me. Amazon manages. Eli's manages to send four pound cheesecakes packed in dry ice across the country. Thinking I would find Another Way, I went to Ace Hardware and bought the smallest nut they had. It was hexagonal, but it cost 23 cents. It was still too big.
     So I went online, and appealed to several other clock shops. One in Michigan. And another in Oregon. I explained what I was looking for.
     Creative Clock in Eugene, Oregon called and left a message. They had the nut, and I didn't have to drive to the West Coast to get it. They would send it to me for $7, total, including shipping. Before I could return his call, Amber, from the Michigan store phoned. They too had the nut, and would sell it to me. For $28. Plus $4 shipping.
     I went with Oregon. The nut arrived in three days. And I was left with a sense of wonder. One place wanted $4 for what another wanted $28; a factor of seven. Quite a lot, really. That's like one car dealer wanting $15,000 for a car, and another $105,000. For the same car. While the third place, the local place wouldn't even try. Because putting the nut in an envelope and mailing it was several orders of complexity beyond, say, repairing a broken clock.
     And since Chicago Clock might read this, I should add that you did a great job putting a new mechanism into the clock, and should it once again break, I'll return, and I hope you'll let bygones be bygones. But geez, it's 2020. Mail stuff.
     Oddly, until this moment, I never considered asking Suburban Clock, back in Berea. Maybe because I've walled off that part of my life, and if I made a habit of reaching out to folks back in Berea, I'd soon find myself sitting on the Triangle on Front Street, watching the cars go by, like Forrest Gump. I'm very glad to have the nut in place, and the clock working, chiming the quarter hour, bonging the hour. It makes me feel like I have an ordered and established life of quiet dignity and leisure, even though I have nothing of the sort, except in this one regard.

Flashback 2000: Drugs damaged little Leanna from the start

     With the Chicago Teachers Union strike, I was looking at columns I've written over the years about the public schools, and noticed this column. It's the sort of thing that sticks in the mind. My mind anyway. Not only cradling little Leanna as a drug-damaged infant, but sitting in front of the television, half listening to a local news report about a 13-year-old girl dropping dead in front of her 7th grade classroom, snapping to attention when they mentioned her name.

    "That's my cocaine baby!" I shouted to my wife. I hate to make a sad story even sadder, but I realize now she would have been 33 years old had her mother not taken those drugs. I'd draw your attention to the reaction of the principal: It isn't easy teaching children, not if you do it right.


     Delores Dorsett smoked herself into labor on a crack cocaine binge. Doctors tried to stop it, but two days later, on Mother's Day, 1986, her daughter Leanna was born.
     Like many cocaine babies, Leanna was born with problems, the greatest being she was three months premature, and weighed 1 pound, 13 ounces. She lost several fingers from the umbilical cord wrapping tightly around them and cutting off the blood. She had a club foot. She was so damaged that doctors had to test her blood to determine she was a girl.
     I met Leanna and her mother that autumn. On Fridays, we would go together to Northwestern University's Perinatal Dependency Clinic. Delores Dorsett had an addict's openness. She would answer any question, and slowly it dawned on me that she had spent her life talking to officials, and I was now one of them.
     When I first saw Leanna, she was 3 months old and weighed 5 pounds, 6 ounces—underweight for a newborn. She was a shocking baby, with huge, desperate eyes that bored into you. While the terrible cocaine withdrawal at birth had passed, she was still jittery when you held her, writhing and crying and fussing, though her doctor wasn't sure if it was due to the cocaine or being born prematurely.
     Her mother was then 30 years old and had seven children. Leanna wasn't her only child harmed by cocaine. Nor did Leanna's birth end Delores' addiction. When Leanna came home from the hospital after nearly three months of intensive care, Delores prepared for the occasion by smoking crack.
     For more than a dozen years, I thought about Leanna Dorsett. Wondered what became of her. She was such a small spark of life, facing hard odds, right off the bat. Beaten up in the womb.
     My naive optimism told me that everything would be all right. I would wait a decent interval of years—and those years just snap by—until she was 18, or maybe even 21. And then I would swoop back into her life and find out.
     I truly believed, or hoped anyway, that she would be a college senior somewhere, bright, vivacious, the missing fingers the only hint that she had to battle her way into this unhappy world.
     Would it be fair of me, I often wondered, to present myself at all? This unexpected person, the observer, exploding into her life to tell her that her mother was a drug addict, that she had to be swaddled tightly to give her the sense of security that most babies have naturally but cocaine babies have lost, a balm to her shattered nerves?
     I pondered the matter from time to time. But really there was no rush. The years still stretched ahead. Maybe she would appreciate learning the truth. To have mysteries finally illuminated. Maybe she would resent it. Who could tell? I always believe that the truth helps. But what if your truth is an awful truth?
     That debate doesn't matter now. Leanna Dorsett collapsed and died last week in her classroom at Garrett Morgan Elementary School, where she was in the seventh grade.
     "She was a beautiful young lady," said her foster mother of six years, Claudette Winters. "She liked to dance. She liked music. She liked all her classes."
     She said the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services never told her that Leanna was a cocaine baby.
     "No, they didn't," Winters said.
     That's par for the course for DCFS. Sometimes they tell the parents. Sometimes they don't.
     "It would depend on the case," said Audrey Finkel, the deputy chief of communications for DCFS.
     Leanna's foster mother should have been told.
     "Absolutely," said Dr. Ira Chasnoff, who treated Leanna as a baby and is now president of Children's Research Triangle, an independent organization working with high risk and drug-exposed children. "Any family who is asked to foster or adopt a child needs to have a complete history. It has tremendous implications for the child's ongoing health and education. So even if the child is perfectly healthy, but having behavior problems, you can understand the behavior in context. So often we see children put on medication—Ritalin is an easy out—when what they need is a specific type of therapeutic approach to help manage their behaviors."
     The medical examiner's office said Friday that autopsy results are inconclusive. And while experts don't know that being a cocaine baby could cause a 13-year-old to die suddenly, it certainly might.  

Leanna Dorsett

     

     "We know early on that children exposed prenatally to cocaine have an increased rate of cardiac arrhythmias," Chasnoff said. "We've followed a bunch of children and found they have cleared up by 6 months of age. We have not found any of the children having them at an older age. But I think it's possible."
     Leanna Dorsett was buried Thursday. Her classmates and teachers remembered her not as someone who was dealt an unfair blow, but as a beautiful child whose inherent goodness managed to shine through adversity.
     "There's a lot of broken hearts at the school," said public schools CEO Paul Vallas. "The principal is a veteran, and she's distraught."
     The principal, Dr. Inez G. Walton, wept as she spoke of Leanna.
     "She was still a little wide-eyed girl, a very cordial child, well-mannered, well-dressed," Walton said. "She was a loving child, she tried to please. Everybody just really cared about her because of that. She had problems in terms of academics, because she was physically challenged. She had a lot of operations. But she was a child who would hug. She was just a joy to have in the school, truly a joy. I've lost children before, and all of it hurts. But not like this. This just shook everybody. The engineering staff. The people in the lunchroom. They loved her. This little girl touched everyone in that school like she was an angel on a mission and her mission was to touch people, and she did."
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 23, 2000

Flashback 1998: Hometown is just a distant memory

    I was supposed to be back in my hometown this weekend for the wedding of my friend's daughter, a girl I've known since birth. I felt bad missing it—originally, I tried to schedule the surgery for AFTER the wedding, but my wife put an end to that, and I saw her point: if I damaged my spine waiting a month to go to a wedding, not to mention the travel, and the dancing, and whatever, I would never forgive myself. Nor be forgiven. 
    As it was, I had this column about my hometown already cued up and ready to go. Last month I was friended on Facebook by the prettiest girl in Berea High School in 1978, the homecoming queen. We messaged a bit, in a convivial fashion, and I reminded her of when I asked her to prom—not seriously, I knew she already had a boyfriend; more as a piece of personal performance art, something a newly-confident 17-year-old would do as a lark, because he could, maybe to show he could face the rejection that any ambitious person is going to face every single day. She was very kind about turning me down.
     I mentioned that I had written a column about our home town, 20 years ago. I've considered reprinting it in the past, but it never seemed to quite pass muster. A little flat, maybe. 
     But the beast must be fed, and I think this rises to the standard for a quiet Saturday in August. Besides, there is an interesting tidbit about how this column was received. The Sun-Times editor-in-chief at the time, a flamboyant, pink-cheeked, white-haired slab of a New Zealand press lord, Nigel Wade, phoned me the evening this ran, perhaps a bit squiffy, and accused me of slipping a parody of the Tribune's treacly sentiment-junkie and fellow Ohioan, Bob Greene, into the newspaper—somebody must have suggested that to him. 
      That kind of call didn't happen often—it might never have happened, before or after— and I remember taking a breath, and evenly explaining that I would NEVER do that. I was indeed born in Ohio, in Berea, and that every word in the column is true. Furthermore, just because Bob Greene has wrapped his thick fingers around Nostalgia and is squeezing with all his might doesn't mean he has murdered the emotion for others, and I'm entitled to feel maudlin about my dying home town. I distinctly recall saying, "If he can do it a thousand times, I can do it once." 

The Army-Navy surplus store in my hometown. Growing up
in Berea, I never noticed anything unusual about the name. 

     BEREA, Ohio—The Fashion Shop is shuttered. The movie theater, too, its green and yellow marquee blank. The bank is now an antiques store. You can step behind the counter, right up to the gleaming stainless steel vault door and admire the pristine gears and massive pins inside. Within the vault itself, lacework is on sale.
     For the last two decades, whenever I returned to my hometown of Berea—every year or so—I marveled at how time had passed it by, this little town of 35,000, just west of Cleveland.      
    And pondered a haunting question. 

    How could a business such as the Fashion Shop survive, with its window filled with the same ancient, chipped mannequins modeling what always seemed to be the same pale blue or green checked house dresses? How could the movie house, where "The Sting" played for a solid year in 1973, hope to keep going, with huge multiplexes opening in towns all around?
     The answer is they couldn't.
     I missed the foreshadowing. All the new discount stores on the road between the highway and downtown. They should have been a tip-off. Who'd settle for the Fashion Shop when there is a big outlet mall? Who would go to Milton's Shoes—also gone—when there is a giant discount shoe store?
     Nobody, that's who.
     I tried to tell myself that this is good. That the only constant is change; the sole reason I care is that this is my hometown. I reminded myself what a grim place Milton's Shoes had been, with its scary middle-age clerks, scurrying under the hawk eye of Mr. Milton to retrieve boxes of Buster Browns and Red Ball Jets from the mysterious back room. The stock of shoes, so limited, that in order to fit my EEE feet my mother eventually had to give up and drive all the way into Cleveland, to the palatial Scientific Shoes (yes, that was the name; do you think I could make that up?)
     Hard not to look at the town and feel a little sad. Not only is the place losing its charm, but it's doing so because of bad choices.
     In the 1970s, Berea demolished a big hunk of the downtown to build an open-air mall of charming brick storefronts. It seemed a dynamic step, but it turned out to be a blunder. The downtown stores were just hanging on in their turn-of-the-century buildings. Nobody could afford the high rents in the new mall; the entire thing went under. Every store. Now the mall's an old-age home.
     Don't get me wrong; God bless the elderly. But it does something to a town to put a nursing home at its center. Two, now that I think of it. The old hospital is a nursing home, also.
     The downtown in Berea faces a green triangle—The Triangle, they call it, home to a Civil War memorial, the same stone soldier who stands watch over many small towns. During my visit I saw a panoramic photo of the Triangle from 1928. Then, it was a broad expanse of green trees, with a gazebo and a lot of park benches.
     Now, the Triangle is much smaller, whittled away by street widening and parking space, a last attempt to lure people to the shops, shops that aren't there anymore.
     No more benches. No people downtown to sit in them anyway. Who has the time?
     I tried to tell myself that this is only what is happening in small towns all across America. In comes Wal-Mart, out goes the general store. Up in Evanston, Chandler's, the stationery store, and Hoos Drug are both closed now. A decade ago you couldn't go to Northwestern and not have a funny story about trying to get some Hoos family member to cash your personal check. And seeing Chandler's close was like having the post office go out of business.
     This is the way of the world, I told myself. Someday kids will wax nostalgic about DigiLand and SaveMax, when they are being replaced by whatever comes next. Onward and upward. Excelsior!
     I told myself this. But I didn't believe it.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 30, 1998

Armistice Day, 2018

 

     The small town where I grew up had a triangle downtown instead of a square, and at its center was a statue honoring those who served in the Civil War, the typical Union Army soldier standing at attention upon a plinth, holding his rifle. When World War I came around, many memorials echoed that alert soldier, with doughboys at attention, ready for action, eternally.
     George Julian Zolnay took a different approach when commissioned by the Kiwanis to commemorate the fallen of Davidson County, Tennessee. His statue features a corpse, a dead doughboy, covered protectively by his mother.  It's located in Nashville's Centennial Park, not far from their very odd scale beige concrete reproduction of the Parthenon in Athens, complete with 42-foot statue of Pallas Athena—Zolnay sculpted some 500 feet worth of frieze figures on that displaced pagan temple. 
    Born in Hungary in 1863, he came to the United States to participate in the 1893 Columbian Fair, fell in love with this country, and stayed, becoming a favorite sculptor of the Southland—he sculpted the statue of Jefferson Davis that adorned his grave. Zolnay also returned to Chicago, becoming director of the Chicago School of Fine Arts there. 
     The Armistice—the end of hostilities after the first World War—took place at 11 a.m., Nov. 11, 1918 (the famous "11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.") But Armistice Day wasn't established until a year later, President Wilson's declaration echoing the indifference to lost life that allowed the war to drag on in the first place. There's nothing in it about horror or futility, rather smug self-congratulation at the "splendid forgetfulness of mere personal concerns" with which our country threw away its young men and capital. The tens of thousand dead and maimed is a source of "solemn pride."
     Armistice Day was expanded to honor World War II veterans after 1945, and in 1954 Congress, seeing that the wars would just keep rolling on, changed it to "Veterans Day" to save themselves the trouble of legislating each new crop of war-weary survivors. It is technically different than Memorial Day, as that holiday is designed to honor those who died, while Veterans Day honored those who served, though those two purposes get muddled. Most soldiers never see combat, fortunately, yet their very real contribution to our nations are not exactly highlighted today. There are no statues to stateside quartermasters, though I imagine a lot of grateful troops on the front lines wish there were.
     And to give the final dusting of dreary practicality to what started out as a spiritual event, observance of the holiday was kicked to Friday, if Nov. 11 fell on a Saturday, or to Monday, if it fell on a Sunday like today, with the Uniform Monday Holiday Act in 1971. In other words, no mail tomorrow, not that anybody cares about the mail much anymore.
     So not great art by any stretch of the imagination. What redeems the statue, for me, is the look of stunned grief on the woman's face, a kind of hollow-eyed yet fierce grief. It is true that no war monument matched the true nature of its subject until Maya Lin's radical black granite gash of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. But lesser artists groped toward it. I wouldn't group this statue among fine statuary, even judging by the lowered bar of public monuments. But glorify war it does not.


   

Happy anniversary, Kitty!

Kitty, relaxing in her suite at the Palmer House Hilton. 

        Eight years.
        Eight years ago today: Aug. 28, 2010. The bar mitzvah had been a great success, the luncheon afterward at Prairie Grass consumed and paid for. Now the only thing left to do was collect the boy's present. It had to be done quickly, like jumping out of a plane, lest nerves undo my resolve. In my journal that night I described it this way, "2 Petsmart for leash, puppy chow. Get name tag, 'Kitty' cut by laser. Picked up puppy. Not stressful. Dog never barked. Fell asleep in Kent's arms in back seat."
     That "not stressful" was worth mentioning because it was surprising, to me. Somewhat amazing even. I thought a dog would ruin our lives. 
     And so the adventure began. The 3 a.m. walks in the rain. Back to Petsmart for training both pet and owners. It was effort, yes. It was at times uncomfortable, yes. But it was all somehow necessary and, even, wonderful.
     Eight years. What's to say? Either you get dogs or you don't. Before I didn't. Now I do. Dogs enrich your life, add purpose and meaning. That time we stayed with her in a hotel downtown—the Palmer House was promoting its dog-friendly services and invited me to a sleepover—was as close to being a celebrity as I will ever come. Every eye in the grand lobby swiveled in her direction with interest and delight, and I mused on suddenly finding myself as a fussy older man with a little dog. At Miller's as we walked past, the barflies tapped on the window and waved and smiled.
      She was the perfect dog for us. Sweet, loving, energetic. People mistake her for a puppy still, though of course she is now in the definition of middle age. Eight is half of 16, which evokes the haunting line of Mary Oliver's, "How many summers does a little dog have?" 

Drying a wet dog

     A lot, I hope. This is the end of her ninth. 
     But a dog doesn't worry about the future, and I've learned a lot from having a dog. Walk frequently. Eat food. Smile if you can. Don't worry so much. The future comes whether you worry about it or not.
     Walking falls to me. She fixes me with a look, and I somehow just know. I almost said, "She doesn't even have to speak," though frankly, if she started talking, it would only surprise me a little. As it is, we communicate.
     Walks morning, noon and night—well, right after waking up, right before dinner and right before bed. We have a ritual. A big, seven-block circuit in the morning, watching our neighbors back their Jaguars and Audis out of their driveways and rush off to work. A shorter walk later in the day, maybe nipping around back, by the village community garden. Then toward downtown, around what I called "The Point," a triangle of flowers and grounds cover across from the train station. Sometimes the spirit moves her and we head downtown to make a loop through the park.
     What's she thinking? Who can say? She has a brain the size of a walnut. "I'm a dog" perhaps. What am I thinking? With my far larger brain? Not much more. "I have a dog. We're walking." Often, this year, I've been listening to books on Audible. Chekhov skewering a "journalist of minuscule reputation" with such specific skill I suspect we must have met, that he must have seen my office and peered into my heart.
    Here, the dog helps. I've certainly taken good care of this dog. Nobody can say I haven't. She could lose a pound or two—my fault, diverting chicken from atop my salad. But not fat. By no means fat. 
     A dog is a kind of exquisite timepiece, a clock I set ticking shortly after Kent's 13th birthday that will, if we're lucky, start ringing a couple years after he leaves law school. I'll look up then, astounded and heartbroken and ask myself where the time has gone. A question that sits there now, to be honest, waving its hand, trying to get my attention. But I won't call on it just now. 
     

A liberal burns Old Glory for Flag Day

     I love to fly the flag — it's so beautiful. On all the patriotic holidays: Memorial Day, July 4, Veteran's Day. I even throw in a few extra, that aren't technically patriotic holidays: Labor Day, Martin Luther King's birthday, D-Day.
     But all this flapping in sun-kissed Northbrook takes its toll on a flag. The deep blue of the canton — the proper name for the square displaying 50 stars — faded to sky blue. A few white stripes had rust streaks from cheap flagpoles.
     Standing on the porch June 6, hand over heart, reciting the pledge, I saw light through a gapping seam. Still, with our nation in the hands of quislings, a faded and tattered flag seems appropriate.
 

Chicago flags and specialty orders are sewn by hand at W.G.N.

   But readers have been upbraiding me for my flag's poor condition. I like to actually consider what people say, to weigh the possibility that those who disagree with me might be right — it's my superpower. And with Flag Day approaching, last Friday seemed a perfect time to make the change. So I folded my worn-out flag into a triangle and headed to W.G.N. Flag & Banner at 79th Street and South Chicago Avenue.
     "Let me get three options for you to choose from here," said Carl "Gus" Porter III, setting out three boxes in his company's cluttered front room, patrolled by Nala the cat.
      "You've got the standard nylon for $31.60," Porter said. "The heavy-duty polyester for $38.90. And then this is our deluxe nylon. These are $40. They have the larger stars with the silver woven into them, and you also get a one-year fade guarantee."
     "I do believe that's the no-brainer of all-time," I said, popping for top-of-the-line. "I'll take it."
     W.G.N. Flag has nothing to do with the radio and TV stations of the same acronym. The flag company began in 1916, founded by Porter's great-grandfather, William George Newbould (readers wondering what the W.G.N. initials stand for will be referred to this sentence for further study).

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The cluttered store has been in the same location since 1947; the company itself began down the block in 1916.

Triangle fire still burns

     The March for Our Lives was inspirational, as people across the country, mostly young, gathered Saturday to refute the culture of death that our leaders have allowed to take hold of our country.

     While it was certainly historic, it is also a reminder that change is seldom easy, and that common people ALWAYS have had to win basic human conditions under which to live by protest and action. 

     Sunday happens to be the anniversary of one of the most horrendous workplace tragedies in history, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City. Many of the safety changes in place today—the sort of standards threatened by the Trump administration—were put in place in the wake of the fire.

     I wrote this piece to commemorate its centennial. Note the third paragraph from the end, and remember that promising to enact change, and actually changing, are two very different things.

     At 3:40 p.m. today, Chicago time, it will be exactly 100 years to the minute since someone tossed a cigarette into a bin of scrap cloth on the 8th floor of the Asch Building on New York's Lower East Side, touching off what for the last century has been known as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

      It was a Saturday, so only 600 of the usual 1,000 employees—500 women and girls and 100 men—were working. Their 12-hour shift over, they had put their street clothes on, collected their pay envelopes—$6 a week—and were waiting for the bell. Ten minutes later the place would have been empty.
     The fire raced through the eighth floor, fed by piles of lint, linen hanging on wires from the ceiling and oil stored in the open to keep the machines running. It spread to the ninth and 10th floors, sending panicked workers running to the two fire escapes. One was anchored to the outside of the building, down into the alley. The other was inside.
     The building was 11 years old, considered both "modern"—it was served by four elevators —as well as "fireproof." But the ladders between the levels of the outside escape were missing—those who fled there couldn't get down. And the doors to the inside fire escape were locked, to prevent theft.
     The first fire engine company to respond arrived in minutes, firemen dodging what at first they thought were bolts of cloth being tossed from the burning building.
     They weren't bolts of cloth, but workers leaping to escape the flames. The firemen raced to set up their ladders, but they needn't have hurried—their ladders fell 20 feet short.
     The streets filled with onlookers watching in horror as those trapped above were squeezed between burning and falling to death. Most were teenage girls from immigrant families—Italians, Russians, Germans; most "could barely speak English." The weight of the women on the back fire escape tore it from its moorings and sent it crashing into the alley, killing everyone on it.
     The crowd on the street shouted "don't jump!" but the seamstresses had little choice.
     Five girls watched from one window as the firemen tried to work a ladder to them but couldn't reach. "They leaped together," the New York Times reported the next day, "clinging to each other, with fire streaming back from their hair and dresses."
     A 13-year-old girl hung by her fingertips for three minutes from a 10th-floor ledge before dropping to her death.
     There was heroism. Three of the four elevator operators kept at their posts, making repeated runs to the smoky eighth floor, returning packed with survivors. When one operator finally fled screaming "fire!" into the street, a New York University law student took over and made four more trips before the flames destroyed the shaft.
     It was all over in half an hour—146 workers had died. Examining the charred bodies, the New York City coroner was seen "sobbing like a child." There had been warnings aplenty, which the factory owners ignored.
     "This is just the calamity I have been predicting," said the city's fire chief. "Look around everywhere; nowhere will you find fire escapes. . . . Only last Friday a manufacturer's association met on Wall Street to oppose my plan [for a] sprinkler system, as well as the additional escapes."
     That night at the morgue, another hellish scene unfolded as bereaved relatives gathered to identify loved ones, "the sobbing and shrieking mothers and wives and frantic fathers and husbands of those who had not been accounted for." Many victims, burned beyond recognition, were identified only by the heel of a shoe or the scar on a knee.
     The next day, the police at the morgue turned away many curious New Yorkers: well-dressed businessmen and groups of schoolgirls who came to "see the sights."
     Ironically, the year before, the International Ladies Garment Workers had struck the Triangle, demanding higher wages and better working conditions, the first mass strike by women in the United States. The owners promised to meet their demands, and the strike ended. No changes were made, of course—instead, one by one, those involved in the union were fired, and so were not there that fatal day, but lived to press for the reforms that came in the wake of the disaster.
     The Asch Building was indeed fireproof—largely undamaged by the fire, it stands today, part of New York University.
     Triangle owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were charged with manslaughter but acquitted. Their insurance company compensated them handsomely for their loss.

                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times March 25, 2011