Good pie is hard to find

 

     It wasn't a fixation. While we headed East, none of us were thinking, "Here we come, Tastykakes!" We weren't thinking of them at all. Rather, they came as a pleasant surprise. Like bumping into an old friend. When we pulled in for a pit stop at that service station in Pennsylvania and saw all those familiar beige oblong boxes.
     And only the familiar oblong boxes — the rest of the Tastykake line of products, the cupcakes and donuts and Krinkles and such, well, they could be fine. Or they could be lousy. I don't know. I've never tried them. Because, frankly, the oblong pies were so satisfying the first time we tasted them that the idea of skirting one for, oh, a chocolate cupcake, would be like avoiding your own child to take the hand of a stranger's, just to see what it was like. 

     Tastykake pies are delicious. I hope this doesn't indict my opinion for all my chef friends whose fine, high quality pies I have praised in the past -- Sarah Stegner at Prairie Grass, Gale Gand at Tru, Laura Sayler in her kitchen. If they are cringing in utter moral revulsion, well, I'm sorry. I never pretended to be the pure palate of pie justice. It's just that the Tastykake has a really good crust. Not the greasy, flaky mess you find in most mass-produced pies. Or did. The collapse of Hostess seems to have deflated the packaged pie market. 

     But Tastykake is still here; well, still there, on the East Coast. There's something about it, almost a little undercooked. It has a pie dough taste. The filling is almost secondary -- I go with the lemon, a lemon meringue that's not too sweet. But the blueberry is good too. And of course the custard. And cherry isn't bad.

     Don't underestimate the rarity factor.  In this age when you can get anything anywhere, you can't get Tastykakes in Chicago (with the exception of a couple Philly cheesecake places that order a few Tastykake products on Amazon, and then, inexplicably, the one I called to confirm this ignores the pies. Go figure).
    My guess is the secret to Tastykakes is they don't load them up with preservatives. On our way back to Chicago, on Aug. 15th, we went to a service station in Pennsylvania where the Tastykake truck had just pulled up and was loading a shelf full of new pies. Their pull date was the 19th, four days away, which seemed extraordinary. My assumption is that a Hostess fruit pie would be good for months —I have to assume, because I tried to confirm this, but of course they're gone. I looked for something similar, but the five places I tried in Chicago didn't have any prepackaged fruit pies at all. Note to savvy businessmen: an opportunity! The closest product I could find, a Kellogg's cinnamon apple Nutri-Bar, is good until March, 2014—well, not good, but "good," in theory. "Good" as in "not stale," which is not the highest of compliments.
    How do they do it? The Tastykake people say they keep homemade in mind.
    "We try to use the basic ingredients, like your wife making a pie at home, but on a much larger scale," said Brent Bradshaw, a vice president of marketing at Flowers Foods, in Georgia, which owns Tastykake. "The pies are a unique item, in that little tin."
     Don't underestimate the role of the tin either — it's nostalgic, of course, and adds to the aesthetic experience, the way the foil around a Hershey bar did before they got rid of the foil. The tin helps, because the pie can be more delicate in a tin; it doesn't have to hold its own shape together as a lozenge pie does, or did, when someone still made them. 
     Bradshaw said one secret is that the pies are not sent to warehouses to sit around ossifying. "We're not going to put a lot of days on it," he said. "We want it brought in fresh on our delivery trucks. Other brands may ship to third party distributor, then to somebody else, they may take a few days to put it on the shelf We want our drivers in there every day."
     So do I. The short shelf life is the good news. The bad news is that, because of the short life of the pies, Chicago is just too far away from the old Philadelphia Naval Yard, where their bakery is located, to permit them being sold here. Distributing here just wouldn't be worthwhile—the extra day on the road would cut into the pies' already brief lifespan. And, frankly, they don't need us.
    "They sell very well, especially in the Pennsylvania market," said Bradshaw.
    So pie, among its many wonderful qualities, also helps maintain the uniqueness of the nation's disparate regions. I hope Tastykakes, perhaps lured in by the collapse of Hostess, never gets greedy, shoots its pies full of preservatives and starts shipping them to warehouses around Chicago.  It wouldn't be the same. There should be some things that are only available in certain parts of the country. Otherwise why travel at all? Why take the trouble and time to go somewhere if all you are going to find is exactly what you left behind? If the people at the Tasty Baking Company—is that a great name or what?— are reading this, remember the lesson of Krispy Kreme, which exploded from hard-to-find exotic Southern treat to over-exposed dull failure, and quickly too. Once upon a time my wife and I walked nearly an hour through early morning Manhattan to get to the Krispy Kreme on 6th Avenue, the first one north of the Mason-Dixon line. Now I wouldn't extend my arm to pluck one off a plate right in front of me. A word to the wise, Tastykake. Good pie is by definition hard to find. You have to earn it.

Strong at the broken places

     Justine Fedak and I met in the living room at Joakim Noah's house. I was there to interview the 6'11 Bulls star center. She was there because, well, she's everywhere — in charge of brand strategy, advertising and sponsorships for BMO Harris Bank across North America, she is the bank's liaison to both the Bulls and Blackhawks, among other duties, and is responsible for the fact that you can't watch a minute of basketball or hockey in Chicago without having positive thoughts about BMO Harris gently massaged into your cerebral cortex.

       In 99 out of 100 cases, that would have been that. I can't tell you whether corporate media relations harbors more incompetents that journalism or dentistry or any other field. But many marketing types have the tentative, I'm-just-visiting-here quality of birds setting down before a park bench. Land, peck a bit, then they're off and good luck ever finding them again, particularly when you need them most.
    Justine Fedak is not like that. Once I got within her field of vision she saw to it that I stayed there. She kept circling back, to check up on things, with such deftness that I found myself convinced she just sincerely likes me as a person and wants to enjoy the pleasure of my company, which may very well be the case. Or she might just be a very skilled communications executive doing her job. Hard for me to tell. You'll have to ask her.

    To be honest, I should have disliked Justine, on general principles, just for the fact that she is writing one of those guest columns in Splash, the Sun-Times celebrity/fashion magazine, a pickaxe to the foundation of my own gig. If any random bank executive with a certain flair can suddenly snag the interest of readers, well, then you don't really need guys like me hanging around on salary, do you? I try not to think about it.

     What kept me from disliking her, beside her disarming manner, is that she is good at column-writing, having discovered the secret of compelling writing: calibrated honesty. Not the make-myself-look-good-at-all-costs myopia that drags down even professional writers, not the let-it-all-hang-out excessive candor that causes amateurs to send readers cringing away. But just the right deft touch, not too hot, not too cold. Such as her column about how she had to stop drinking when she learned she had Multiple Sclerosis in 2001. Or another about the cane she has to use because of the disease. Or even about her trademark funky eyeglasses.

     So though I avoid luncheons like the living death they often are, particularly luncheons involved with any kind of good cause, when I saw that Justine was being honored by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society's Greater Chicago Chapter at the Ritz-Carlton in Monday, I made a point to be there. I'm not sure what I expected, but not the 500 people who also decided to show up. Oh, right, I'm not the only person she knows. Shit. I thought I was. Justine has a way of doing that.

     Still, I was glad to be there. I learned a lot. Multiple Sclerosis is a chronic, disabling disease where the immune system attacks the central nervous system. Myelin, the fatty substance that shields nerves, is scarred ("sclerosis" is medical-speak for scarring, or hardening of body tissue) and the multiple part comes because it can attack the brain, the spinal cord, the optic nerve.  Nobody knows what causes it and nobody knows how to cure it. Yet. But Justine is on the case.

     A lot of people got up and talked about how wonderful she is. Alan McNally, the former CEO of Harris Bank (and the former chairman of Walgreens; busy guy)  introduced her, and she demonstrated how right they were, with a powerful, effective, brief speech that merged the heretofore separate realms of impassioned disability activism and savvy brand management.

    "When you first get a diagnosis of MS, it's pretty macabre, it's pretty dark," she told the room. "Multiple sclerosis—I had no idea what that meant. I thought it was muscular dystrophy, and find out from the MS Society I was not alone in that thought. But what I knew is, I couldn't feel my left leg anymore. I was extremely tired, I was in terrible pain, felt like my body was being seared. Things that used to come to me very easily were very, very hard. And I started to doubt myself. I wanted to hide it. I wasn't always this open, because I was worried people would judge me.  And the career... I really figured I couldn't do it anymore."

   What allowed her to carry on and triumph over the disease was her employer, her boss at BMO Harris Bank, who "knew me well enough to push me. For me it was my work." 
     She said she shouldn't have been surprised, but she was.

     "The irony is BMO has always been a company that has broken the glass ceiling, that has given people an opportunity," she said. "It was all about your performance. I knew this, but I still doubted it, because it was too overwhelming and too scary. BMO embraced me when I was ready to give up."

     As can happen with difficulties, coping with MS forced Justine be a better person than she thought she could be. She learned to use a cane, then learned to love it.
    "It's forced me to look at myself differently," she said. "It's forced me to be more forgiving of myself. It's forced me to talk openly about what scares me. It's forced me to ask for help, and I hate asking for help, because I like to do things myself."
     After the speech, I leaped to my feet with the rest of the audience, clapping my hands sore, heart swelled for her and the great people she works with.
     It was only later, upon reflection, that I understood what she had pulled off, and my admiration deepened. She had a wonderful message, true—"I started to realize that I had to be in love with my life, every minute"—but she also managed to plug, not just BMO Harris, but a range of corporate interests: the Bulls, the Blackhawks, Walgreens, Edleman, the Sun-Times, Splash, her doctors, the National MS Society.
     Which some people will naturally smirk at, clinging to the too-easy, corporate-equals-bad mentality. Corporations have a bad rap because they often do bad things. But they also do good things, at least if you believe Justine Fedak, and I do.  You kinda have to. Because she knows a secret that many PR sorts never grasp—that if you are obviously candid in one area, particularly a difficult area, then you build trust, and people will believe you in another, completely unrelated area. And Justine is obviously candid.
     "The disease betrays you, it's very unpredictable," she said. "You never know when it's going to take hold of you....We don't think about disability, because we don't have to. But now I do, because I have to...People don't donate  because they don't understand MS. I have it and I don't understand it. This is the most random, ridiculous disease of all time."
     She referred to herself in the speech, several times, as "broken," the disease had broken her. She left it to her audience, or at least me anyway, to think of that Hemingway line from  A Farewell to Arms, "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." 

To help fight the most random, ridiculous disease of all time, click here.

 

 

   

   

Look! Clean sheets! And fresh toilet paper too!

     It must be really hard to run a hotel. There are so many things to get right—rooms to clean, carpets to vacuum, toilets to scrub. Reservations to keep straight. Phones to answer. Breakfast to dish out. The elevators have to work.
    And still people complain. All the time. Even when everything is perfect, as the Hampton Inn & Suites in Streetsboro, Ohio seemed to us, at first. We had a long drive, from New York City, over 400 miles, and had one more night before we gratefully reached home. We were tired.
     This Hampton Inn, a modern, smartly-decorated lobby, all muted orange and tomato red. Square water container with sliced oranges. A tray of cookies. Free newspapers. A pool off the lobby that looks inviting—most motel pools are gross. This one you wanted to sit beside, and I did. Outside, a basketball court. Next to each room was a different black and white art photo of some comforting, homey object: a compass, an Adirondack chair, a vintage pickup truck. A well-equipped fitness center. 
     Every little thing was considered. Our room happened to look out on, well, nothing—a tar paper roof filled the window. I never would have noticed, might not have pulled back the curtain—I didn't care about the view. But there was a small, plasticized coupon, apologizing for the view, offering us a free snack, soda and a sweet, from the gift shop, their way of saying, "sorry for the vista of shingles." Thoughtful. I let the boys use it to pick treats.
      But it wasn't quite perfect. In fact, there was something wrong, something bothersome. This one little thing, this fly in the ointment, and I'm reluctant to say it. Makes me sound nit-picky, which I certainly am. But the Hampton Inn was having a big advertising push, a media blitz, that included the above poster, affixed across the entire inside elevator door—a promotional technique I had never seen before—plus Post-It notes on each headboard, another first, ballyhooing this special feature that the hotel was extraordinarily proud of:
     Clean sheets. 
     The poster read: "daily special: clean bed," in lower case letters, perhaps to stress the e.e. cummings modernity of this benefit. The fine print drove home the wonder: "duvet covers & sheets are laundered fresh, every guest, every room, every day." A blissful blonde child and her teddy were shown sleeping serenely on their clean sheets.
    My first thought was: so much for the environmental kick. Because up to now, hotel communications on this topic were mostly trying to shame guests into not having their sheets changed every day and to urge them to hang up their wet towels instead of tossing the towels on the floor, in order to save the whales. That too was a bit annoying—it seemed a disingenuous gambit to cut down on the laundering bill disguised as environmentalism. Now this; now they were lunging the other way, making a grand show of washing your sheets as a quotidian gift, which is nice, but it's not as if you don't leave them on the bed for a week or three at home. The pendulum swings. 
     That they wash the duvet cover before you get there is unquestionably a benefit; most hotels don't—most hotels don't have a duvet, which is sort of a pillowcase the comforter goes in. Rather, they have a bedspread, and my wife immediately, ritualistically, cringingly strips it off the bed, expounding about God knows how many people have done God knows what upon it. She doesn't quite burn the bedspread in the sink, but the attitude is the same. She flings it in a corner as if it were crawling with smallpox and vermin and lice, crusted with secretions. Maybe it is.
     So clean duvet covers, hooray, and had it stopped there, it would have been welcome, although better had they just done it a little more quietly. This was a step away from "We Dig the Hair Out of the Drain." Well golly, thanks.  
    Then Hampton Inn took it a step too far, as sometimes happens in advertising. They included sheets, which to me should be a given. Plugging the cleanliness of the bedding struck me as, not an improvement, but a ratcheting down of standards. It implies that giving guests fresh sheets when they arrive is suddenly an option at Hampton Inn. This week they're doing it and proud —the "daily special" they called it—next week, who knows? No special sales event lasts forever. Maybe the clean sheets promotion won't either. "Oh the sheets are stained in your room? Yes, that is how we do it now. Clean sheets are only in August...."
    Up to now, I've never considered whether the hotel I was in wouldn't automatically—and modestly—give me clean sheets, and I've stayed in hotels in Haiti that cost $16 a night. Hampton Inn, however, thinks doing so is special -- they're proud of washing their sheets, lately. Gosh, I hope they did so before. I just assumed....  
    Enough. I should say, before I let this go, having gnawed the topic too long already: the place was great. Even with the strange blurt of pride over basic hygiene. I'd stay there again in a heartbeat. The Hampton Inn & Suites, just off I-80, in Streetsboro, Ohio. Redecorated just last year. Run by nice, proud people. Big, tasty breakfast. And I'm sure not one guest in 100 would be annoyed by the clean sheets promotion. I just happen to be that one guest.

And if you need something to read in your motel...

     The paperback edition of "You Were Never in Chicago" is officially published today:

Click here to go to Amazon and buy the thing.

Smile! The Google car is watching you.

     The Suburu Impreza is not the kind of car that normally gets the kiddies pressing their faces to the car window on a road trip. No snarling Ferrari this. But it wasn't an ordinary compact car either that we encountered blasting down I-80 through the blankness of Indiana. Rather, it was one of the fleet of vehicles that Google Inc. has dispatched all over the world, taking pictures for their Google Street View application. Hard to believe, but they have been doing it for six years now -- in 2007, they had seven cities roughly photographed. Now they have 3,000 covered, with the ambitious goal of photographing every inch of the civilized world and much of nature as well.
     The project has not been without controversy, particularly overseas, where they take privacy more seriously than in the U.S., though 38 U.S. states sued Google, not for the photos, which are stitched together digitally to create 360 degree panoramas, but for hoovering up electronic data — passwords, emails, even medical records — from unprotected wi-fi networks as they drove along. Google promised to stop, and paid a $7 million fine, which is a rounding error on the company's daily profits.
     My boys wanted me to drive alongside the car, not only so they could eyeball the colorful vehicle, but so that our silver 2005 Odyssey might actually appear on Google Street View and thus achieve immortality. I did as they asked, though at first I was a little resentful. These are the same boys who shrug at being in my newspaper columns, and are completely indifferent to appearing in my books. Ho-hum, de nada. But to get the family van into Google Street View? That's significant. 
     Relax, I told myself. One must adapt to the times. Sneering at the Google Street View car is the 2013 version of "Pop Hates the Beatles." Why not get excited? Of course it's wonderful. It is indeed very cool. You must admire the nerve of a company that set out to map the earth and offer the result to its customers for free. I've used Street View myself, to eyeball a building that I might have otherwise jumped in the car to go look at (convenient as hell, though not exactly an improvement in investigative rigor. Google Street View notwithstanding, it's still better to get your ass out of the chair and go look). Sending these compact cars skittering over the planet's surface might not be exactly the same as raising the pyramids or constructing St. Peter's Basilica. But it comes from the same impulse toward mastery, toward grandeur, toward taking on a seemingly impossible task and doing it.
    We drove along, snapping pictures, until one of us wondered whether the bearded gent driving the Google car might not mind being tailed and photographed. Which gave us all a laugh, given that he was part of a company criss-crossing all seven continents in a global like-it-or-not invasion of everybody else's privacy, if that isn't already an antique term. He had better not mind; turn-about is fair play. 
 

Photos by Kent Steinberg

Cleveland is looking good.

     Growing up on the outskirts of Cleveland when I did — the 1970s — left me with plenty of love for the city, though not a deep well of civic pride. Between our risible mayors, like Ralph J. Perk and Dennis Kucinich, and our burning Cuyahoga River, and our miserable baseball team, and our lone skyscraper, the Terminal Tower, that looks like the box the Statue of Liberty came in, well, Cleveland was, as I put it, "a good place to come from" though not bursting with specific present day accomplishments.

      Still, it was home, and I went back, periodically, though mostly to my actual hometown of Berea, west of the city. But during visits, I would still foray into Cleveland, to the Cleveland Museum of Art, or to go to a restaurant, or hear music. There was sort of brave yearning to Cleveland, a hunger to be better than it was, a feeling that was perfectly encapsulated in a card I found by the cash register in a store in the woebegone, fading Arcade in the mid 1980s, titled "Reasons to Be Proud of Cleveland." The idea, I suppose, was to tuck the card in your wallet and, should you find yourself put on the spot to explain what you like about the place, you could always whip the card out and consult it. The heart breaks.
     In the mid-1990s, the city seemed to finally undergo a renaissance. The suddenly hot Indians were winning games in the new, way cool Jacobs Field. The Ritz Carlton took over the formally moribund Terminal Tower Plaza and installed these dramatic high tech fountains. They even built another skyscraper downtown, so now there were two.
    Then, over the past decade, Cleveland seemed to slip again. The Indians weren't doing well anymore. The overbuilt Flats pleasure zone crumbled. The recession was on. Even comfortable little Berea sagged sadly, with boarded up houses and depopulated schools. Berea was bad enough; I was afraid to go to Cleveland and see how bad things were there.

Cleveland Museum of Art

     Earlier this month, however, heading to the East Coast to check out colleges, we planned to stay with friends in Berea, and scheduled ourselves a day to hang out and catch up. It says something about my perception of Cleveland that, even though my younger kid had just asked me why we never visit Cleveland, and even though I have happy memories of the place, the thought of actually going there for a few hours never crossed my mind. Why depress ourselves?
     But our Berea hosts, suggesting a Saturday afternoon activity, pointed out that they were showing "Citizen Kane" at the Palace Theater, a grand old movie house downtown. That sounded fun, and if we going downtown, well, it made sense to go early and look around.
 We stopped first at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which I vaguely remembered for a nice Henri Rousseau painting of oranges and a tiger, for a good Blue Period Picasso, for the fact that its Rodin "Thinker" sculpture had been bombed by radicals in 1970. And that's about it. 
     The museum, which marked its 100th year this year, has just undergone a $350 million overhaul. Its courtyard has been turned into a vast, jaw-dropping interior exhibit space, giving the museum a new, dramatic air. It looks great, and was thrilling to wander around. They're still got the Rousseau, too. 
     We had a picnic lunch between the Thinker and the lagoon, which I remembered as a dismal, deserted place. No more. Now it is bright and welcoming. An engaged couple was having their photos snapped around the fountain there while we ate, and gradually it dawned on me that we weren't in peril.  I explained to the boys that, rather than repair the statue after it was blown up, the museum cleverly returned it to its perch, damaged, a stronger commentary than the statue, overexposed to the point of cliche, would convey on its own. (I also told them the little known identity of the Thinker: he's supposed to be Dante, conjuring up his Inferno). 

    People tend to lump Cleveland with Detroit and St. Louis and Gary and other dying cities, and while it certainly still has challenges, Cleveland bounced back strongly from the recession, and the downtown shimmers.  Euclid Avenue—which I remember as a gritty, blasted, roll-through-the-stoplights-praying thoroughfare—looks refreshed, with the world-famous Cleveland Clinic having gobbled up block after block, turning them over to prosperous constituent medical facilities.
      The show at the Palace, complete with popcorn and a live organist, was surprisingly well-attended for a 70-year-old movie. Tickets were $5, as was all-day Saturday parking nearby.

The Arcade

    We stopped at The Arcade -- built in 1890, the first large scale interior shopping mall in the country, which I remember as a Godforsaken melange of dying shops — and found it taken over by a Hyatt Regency, polished and peopled. East Fourth Street, once a hooker hangout, is now closed to cars and a jammed pedestrian restaurant strip that makes you think of Little Italy in New York City or even New Orleans.
     We skipped the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, so I can't assess it—my wife and I had gone there once, when it opened, and seemed more tomb than celebration, a mothballed collection of fringed jackets and sequined boots that only faintly hints at the living spirit of the music. "I saw the Ramones at the Agora," I said, explaining that visiting the Hall of Fame is like strolling through a cemetery. 

Soldier and Sailors Monument

     Each Cleveland icon we visited was in better shape than I recalled. Cleveland's Public Square is framed by the Terminal Tower and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, an elaborate Civil War memorial, a massive pillar surrounded by life size bronze sculptures. In my day it was a grimy hangout for winos—now it's scrubbed and fresh-looking, closely watched by a friendly docent who told us about the Civil War. Across the street, the Higbee's Building—movie fans might recall it as a setting for "A Christmas Story"—is now a Horseshoe casino, which we quick-stepped through, just to absorb the transition. Frankly, I'd rather have a department store, but it's better than nothing. 
      We strolled over toward the lakefront, by City Hall, where Chris Kennedy's $465 million Medical Mart & Convention Center is set to open in October, and we marveled that his investors were able to snag such primo property for the endeavor. The Medical Mart would be a major enterprise for any city to pull off in this economy, a source of pride that Clevelanders won't need mnemonic devices to recall. 
     Not all is beer and skittles in Cleveland, of course. While we were there, The Plain Dealer, Cleveland's sole newspaper, switched to three-day-a-week home delivery, and while that might be necessary as newspapers fight to stay alive and transition to all-electronic forms, it was sad to see the paper attempt to ballyhoo the loss as a benefit, pretending that cutting back on delivery was an exciting new development, a favor to readers, and that their continued ability to buy it daily in stores represented some kind of groundbreaking new service. I suppose candor would have been too much to expect—"We're trying to stay in business, bear with us"—but a bit of historical perspective might have eased the transition. Newspapers used to print five editions a day. The Plain Dealer used to be kept on its toes by the Cleveland Press, a spunky rival that once printed an open letter to John Paul II on its front page, in Polish, begging him to come to Cleveland. Home delivery three times a week, soon they'll print three times a week, then they'll print none, and now we're in the painful interregnum. Things change. Sometimes puffery only makes it worse. If your newspaper won't tell you the truth, who will?
     But I don't want to end on a sour note. We pulled out of Cleveland marveling at the good time we had—the new museum really is a must-see, and the Chicago Theater should take a tip from the Palace and start showing movies now and then, though I bet they'd charge $30 before they'd charge $5.    
     There had been a bit of foreshadowing to all this. A few days before we left Chicago, a coworker, knowing I'm from Cleveland, told me he had just returned from a few days in the city. "Business?" I asked. No, he said, he just took his family there on a brief vacation, and they all had a swell time. At the time I just looked at him dubiously. Really? Leave Chicago to go to Cleveland? And have fun? But having spent just one Saturday poking around downtown, now I understand. It's a changed city.

     

Nice work if you can get it: the college tour

     Eight colleges: Princeton, Yale, Brown, Williams, Amherst, Middlebury, Dartmouth, Columbia. Visited, one after another, boom-boom-boom, during a two-week, 2800-mile trek to the East Coast. Probably not the typical American summer vacation. Not exactly Disney World. But we are odd ducks, we Steinbergs. We liked it.

      We went to kick the tires of prospective schools for the oldest boy, the 17-year-old incoming senior — a “rising senior” I’ve learned to say, just one of many details of the academic world gleaned on the trip, from the proper pronunciation of Amherst — “Amerst,” no “h,” who knew? — to the fact that Middlebury has its own private ski slope, to the full name of Columbia University, “Columbia University in the City of New York,” which made me reflect on the economic, almost beautiful concision of “University of Chicago.” 

Nassau Hall -- Princeton

      The older lad picked the colleges. His brother, 16, gamely tagged along. My wife plotted the itinerary and found good hotels. My input, other than genes in the mid-1990s and resisting the urge to constantly quote Robert Browning’s line “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?” was to insist there be some pure vacation stuff tucked in as well, between the tours, lest we go mad. Thus three days in a mountain cabin in Vermont, plus a couple days at the seashore in Massachusetts. I also drove most of the way.

     Prospective student tours are a big deal to colleges. Tens of thousands of potential customers beating a path to your place of business, begging to be impressed, fighting for the chance to give you money. It's an opportunity to be seized upon, even though only a fraction of the visitors — a handful in a hundred — will end up attending.

    As a guy in the communications biz, I was interested in how the schools met this challenge, how they presented themselves. Some were first rate. Some did a surprisingly cack-handed job of it. We attended an information session and a tour at each of the eight — tag team affairs where an official from the admissions office would talk up the school, or try to, then a student would lead a tour, though sometimes students were warm-up acts for the official, or even joined in the discussion.

      Princeton has the loveliest campus — sedate, beautiful, historic. Just strolling around lures you into the dream of luxury, of perfection. “I wish there were some animals, such as peacocks,” my older son actually said, as if he were landscaping Heaven. The town of Princeton adjacent to campus has the feel of an old money resort. The jeweler where I went at lunchtime to get a battery for my watch waved away my offer of payment, perhaps out of kindness, perhaps out of the charmed notion that I might return and buy a Patek Philippe or — my suspicion — perhaps because they do not traffic in trifles.

Yale 

      The Princeton info session took place in a vast science lecture hall, with a vaulted ceiling and old wooden desks, a complex, two story blackboard with giant, mysterious antique gauges above it, as if Michael Faraday had just stepped away for a beaker of benzene. The session, run by an assistant dean of admissions, was brisk, polished and without a false note.

     Afterward, our guide, Christine, a confident Californian sophomore, reminded me how out-of-touch with youth culture I have become. None of the bands or celebrities she mentioned attempting to impress us sparked even the faintest flicker of recognition with me — they could have been made up. It all sounded like, We had concerts by Woodburning Set, Dingus and the Feathered Friends last year. Plus Peter Piper filmed his last movie, "Delirium Tremens" here. That happened at nearly every tour. 

     The Princeton campus is wired for wi-fi, of course, and one has to wonder how much the traditional academic trimmings are mere backdrop. In praising the library, our guide said, “I like to touch 19^th century books because they’re cool.” And here she paused, musing. “I don’t do anything, I just touch them and move on with my life.” No one hissed.

Sterling Library -- Yale 

    If Princeton felt somehow delicate and colonial, Yale had a more solid, medieval cathedral feel, even though those Gothic edifices usually turned out to be dorm bell towers and dining halls. The younger boy and I ducked out of the info session to explore New Haven’s city cemetery, where we found the graves of Glen Miller and Charles Goodyear. We returned for the tour. Our spunky North Carolina guide kept being interrupted by gas mowers and heavy machinery — lots of summer landscaping and construction at these cash-washed universities.

    Then we went to Brown. “Is this the college? No!” my older son said, aghast, after we parked at the periphery of campus, something of a hodgepodge after Princeton and Yale. Sitting, waiting for the information session to begin, I pointed to a brochure calling Brown “a microcosm of architectural styles.” The bright spin. “PR 101,” I told my wife. “Try to turn your flaw into an attribute.”

      The Brown admissions official — I should shield her name, lest I inadvertently add to the ranks of the unemployed — began her talk by introducing herself with these words: “I love cloudy weather, rainy days and my favorite animal is the baby penguin.” I wish I could say she was being ironic, but she wasn’t. After Princeton and Yale’s sharp presentations, it was like stepping from a fancy restaurant to a child’s lemonade stand. Helping her not at all was a student who spoke so fast he could hardly articulate words. “Like an auctioneer,” I jotted in my notebook and showed my wife, who nodded grimly. “Eighty percent of Brown students go to graduate school,” the official said. “The other 20 percent become admissions officers.” That wasn’t quite: “Don’t get a degree from Brown because it’s practically worthless.” But it sure came close. (Note to proud Brown alumni: don't blame me for telling you. I'm not saying the school isn't a fine one — it may very well be. Just that the presenters didn't manage to convey it, at least not to us). 

    In fact, the duo did such a thorough job of undermining any interest in Brown we might have had that, when their effort came to an end, we all stood up, looked at each other and mutually agreed to skip the tour and just hurry to Amherst. At the last moment, my oldest son said, “Well, we’re here already,” and we reversed course and joined a tour. We were glad we did, because the guide, an enthusiastic young man from Mexico City (“Daniel, like the girl’s name,” he said, pronouncing it “Danielle”) did much to repair the battered reputation of the school, earnestly explaining how he had found his home at Brown. He radiated energy, though didn’t keep Brown from sinking to the bottom of the list and staying there.

     We made it to Amherst late, though in time for most of their last session of the day, guided —practically passed hand-over-hand — to the proper place by helpful students. Arriving at an intense disquisition in a spare, white meeting room, flanked by balconies, I felt like we had barged in a 1650 Pilgrim chapel. I kept wishing this serious conversation could be projected on a split screen to the assembled Brown community, alongside their own clownish performance, as penance.  “We have the resources to support your creative and intellectual endeavors,” the Amherst official said.
     Amherst is nestled in mountains. Our Amherst guide took great pride in walking backwards, and swung mightily for the home team. "Liberal arts does not mean unemployed," she said. She was also the only guide to stress a school's anti-substance abuse policy, including substance-free dorms (all dorms are theoretically drug free, but the designated substance-free dorms really mean it, apparently). 
     Alas, like many guides, she didn't have the whole talking-to-people thing down, and used the word "actually" in every other sentence, as an intensifier. "There's a reason why we love our alumni," she said. "Roughly 50 percent of all our alumni are actually active. Regardless of whether or not you are formally on financial aid, your education is actually subsidized by $20,000. That's because of our large endowment here. We are actually going to see their presence through our alumni database. When it comes to our alumni, we actually have their information on a data base...."
    The word became like a ball peen hammer tapping on the base of my skull, but my family afterward said they didn’t notice it, so maybe it was just me.

     Williams offered perhaps the most impressive spiel, the admissions officer — a canny vet, a few weeks from retirement — who asked students to identify themselves and talk about the reasons they are interested in Williams, then seamlessly wove their expectations into a presentation that covered all aspects of the school. At Williams, you could clearly see the tension between the parents’ interest — that their kids' expensive education would lead to a career of sorts, eventually — and the undergraduate imperative for fun. Williams has a system where you can hop off the study treadmill to pursue personal passions, and the examples given were: stone masonry, cheese-making, exploring surfer culture and a jaunt to Burgundy to learn winemaking, which I’m sure was loads of fun. Why you need a pricey college to master cheese making is another question.

    Of the eight schools, Dartmouth was the only one I had visited previously — Rolling Stone sent me there 20 years ago to do a story about a new way students communicated with one another, using a computerized message system called email, which became so popular some students weren’t even having phones installed in their dorms. I had expected the students to delight in the big shot magazine’s attention, but found them surly, unhappy that Rolling Stone had recently done a profile on the Dartmouth frat that inspired the film “Animal House” and was, apparently, inspiring it still.

Dartmouth

    None of this I mentioned, not wanting to affect my son’s search process with decades-old biases. And indeed, the associate director of administrations, Katie Madden, was as far from Dean Wormer as imaginable: easily the best of the eight, smartly explaining Dartmouth as part of a sharp, well-ordered career strategy that —and I’m exaggerating here only slightly — starts with excelling in high school and ends with winning the Nobel Prize in Medicine. She could easily be cast in the next big budget action thriller as the Secretary of Defense, briefing the president about the unfolding crisis with coolness and precision. Rather than any rambling, I-like-clouds digression, she gave an organized talk, explaining the three aspects to Dartmouth she was going to emphasize — “access, flexibility and engagement” Madden was also the only one of the eight to use real student examples, Dartmouth students she named who were patenting medical devices and forming their own companies and teaching African villages to use foot pump nebulizers.

     “The world is their classroom,” she said. “There are no boundaries to the experience you can have.” Those people at Brown, I kept saying to myself, ought to be ashamed.    

    After that, I was ready for my boy to go all out for Dartmouth. Then came the tour. Our guide had lived in London and Tokyo and Singapore and did, generally, an excellent job of pointing out the locations on campus. He also delved into the realm I had been reluctant to mention. “Everybody drinks under age,” he said, explaining that this is a major reason for fraternities, which — and he didn’t use these exact words, but this was the essence of his meaning — beside their continual charitable work, are basically temperance organizations designed to minimize the harm that comes from campus drinking by providing controlled settings for it to occur under the close supervision of responsible individuals. “Our parties serve really diluted beer,” he said, noting that 70 percent of the student body at Dartmouth join a frat or sorority, prompting my boy, who had researched all these schools down to the last detail, to ask his first question of the trip: “Would you comment on Dartmouth’s unofficial mascot being Keggy the Keg?” To which our guide replied, in essence, “umm.” 

     The last school was Columbia, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  As my boy bounded up to the desk to give his name to admissions clerk, I couldn’t help but think of his great-grandfather, Sam Steinberg, painting billboards in the Bronx in the 1920s, in his coveralls and painter’s cap, lugging around his buckets of whitewash. What would he think about his great-grandson even having a shot to go to Columbia? Proud, I hope. I sure was. In fact, I was what my people call verklempt.

     That quickly passed. Before the administrator showed up, Matt, a perky Columbia student — trim, mod eyeglasses, maroon v-neck, perfect pompadour — gave a presentation that was almost a performance piece, like one of the monologues from “A Chorus Line.”  Much of the appeal of Columbia, apparently, involves Hollywood stars joining your 
a capella group and seeing Daniel Radcliffe — whose name I at least recognized — shoot a movie scene on campus.

Columbia

     Still, he was sprightly and sincere — so sincere I wished his remarks, too, could be recorded and saved. Not to shame Brown, but so Matt, who no doubt will make a fine professional someday, could be shown it in 20 years time, to his certain horror.  Asked his favorite class, he replied “salsa and reggae dancing” and praised a student club called “Feel Good.”

     “They make grilled cheese and then just bring it to you,” he said. And to think Columbia only charges $60,000 a year to attend.

     He was relieved at last by a grown-up, James Minter, the director of international admissions, a robust, mustachioed man in a blue polo who had a calm, steady demeanor that I liked very much. He was like someone from the Army Corps of Engineers sent to explain how Columbia University would build a bridge to your future life. “Argument is what we do here,” he said, detailing the core curriculum of classics, and I looked over at my boy, to whom argument comes as naturally as breath. Minter spoke about himself, but in a sophisticated fashion. He was born in Georgia, he said, and was asked: did not moving to New York City seem a cultural shock?

     “For me, the culture shock was birth,” he said. “Coming to New York was correcting the mistake.” By the time he was done, the audience was leaning forward, breathless, its collective heart pinned on Columbia. Or, again, maybe it was just me.

      Regarding my older boy's impressions, he's a very close-to-the-vest lad. Let's just say, not Brown. Applying to high end colleges is the rare situation in American life where it's unarguably far better to be a rural black child or a Navajo. Bright middle class suburban Jewish kids are a dime a dozen, and need to bring clean drinking water to an African village or figure out something clever in their essays or snag a bit of luck to get themselves snatched from the slurry. We had managed to boost our prominent noses over the cliff's lip and were staring at the Promised Land of upper crust academic success. But whether my hard-working kid could claw his way that last mile, to an actual spot under one of those majestic oaks, is another matter. We didn't dwell on it.

Morgan Library -- New York

     The younger boy is into celebrity food television, so as a reward for his preternatural patience, we let him pick the restaurant in New York to go to after it was all over, and he chose Marcus Samuelsson's Red Rooster, at 125^th and Lenox, where we had a glorious Southern feast, outdoors on a beautiful summer day, watching the lively Harlem streetscape stroll by. Which made me think that Tolstoy was wrong when he said that all happy families are alike. Each happy family is happy in its own idiosyncratic way. At least ours is, happy just to seek, to explore, to learn, to try. A bit of success would be nice, too, but we aren't expecting promises.
     After lunch, while the older boy headed uptown with his mother to huddle with a Columbia neurological researcher and tour her lab, my younger son and I slipped downtown to have some fun, and visit the Morgan Library. That would not be considered fun for every 16-year-old, nor for every dad, but it was thrilling for the both of us, and we spent a long time studying the treasures that old Pierpont Morgan had hoovered up from Europe.  Next year, we will visit the colleges my younger son is interested in, and while he has only mentioned one so far—the University of Glasgow, because it was founded in 1451—I told him that people have gone to colleges for worse reasons, and that we stand poised to hie ourselves to Scotland and check it out, should he so desire.

   So where did he end up going? To find out, click here.

Columbia University 

Summer fiction week — "Planning My Breakdown"

     Well, if you can't find literary success, at least you can imagine what it would be like. Summer Fiction Week concludes with this youthful speculation of what might be in store.  It didn't work out that way and, frankly, I'm glad. Thanks for reading these —  we'll have seven new stories next August. Until then, back to the narrow realm of fact come Monday morning. 

     For many years already I had been sitting on the wide, breeze-blown porch of the Quogue Island house, watching the sea beyond my beach gently undulate with a steady, dull roar.

     Occasionally, I would break away from reverie long enough to lazily tap out a few keystrokes on my shiny black Remington Upright. Thwap, thwap each type bar would go, hitting against the heavy bonded paper. Thwap, thwap, thwap.

     After reading over the latest word or two, I would smile with casual recognition of genius, and return to contemplation of nature’s grandeur. The ocean, so very ... blue. Every morning exactly at 10 a.m., my new companion, Cassandra, dressed in simple white muslin, would open the screen door and bring out a cup of mint herb tea and a trio of fresh-baked cinnamon shortbread cookies. The screen door always slammed behind her with a loud wooden bang.

     It was that wooden bang, I believe, or perhaps the fact that the cookies were cinnamon shortbread, and there were three of them, which made me suspect my success, so carefully delineated and enjoyed for so many years, was now becoming a bit stale and threadbare. The pied a terre on 12^th Street, just steps away from the Strand, the house on the seashore, the Big Sky ranch, had all served me over and over. My wife Millie had conveniently run off to a celibate ashram in Oregon to “find herself” just as the future as I had always imagined it finally unfolded in its fullest, delightful, award-draped complexity.

     Shortly after I found Millie’s heartfelt note, speckled with charming misspellings, Cassandra—who had waited patiently for an hour in the line at Barnes & Noble—thrust into my hands, not my latest masterwork, open to the title page, but a beautifully embroidered sampler pillow, the chief design element of which was her phone number.

      She was tremendously svelte, for a woman who liked, as much as I, to drink beer and gobble little hot dogs wrapped in dough.  Millie hates them, but Cassandra couldn’t get enough. We ate them morning, noon and night. Nor was she reluctant to make wild, boisterous love minutes before departing for the swank Upper East Side parties which began to dominate our lives more and more, the flush of our exertions on our cheeks as we made our entrance, heads swiveling in our direction, voices hushed, reverently.

     Everyone assumed that a young woman of such attractiveness could only be drawn to a man like me by my fame, not to mention my continually burgeoning wealth. But I knew better, even though the money did at times stun me. How often I simply stared at those publisher’s checks, cut for immense sums, with their official bluish green, lightly patterned backgrounds. I read once where the late Doug Kenney was always absentmindedly sticking huge checks into books as markers, and I did that too, if only for a moment, to gaze happily at the effect, feeling a tingle of vertigo before snatching them out and hurrying off to carefully deposit them safely in the bank.

     In the end, my success became stifling. Cassandra was replaced by others, singularly and in combination. The huge publisher’s checks were supplemented by movie wire transfers and envelopes stuffed with cash, sent my grateful readers. “Please take this,” they wrote, “as words of gratitude fall short...” How many times could the boys from the Lampoon greet me at Logan Airport with a horseless coach, taking up the traces themselves to pull me through the streets of Cambridge? How many rounds of “Hip, hip, hooray!” — an exultation lost to most collegians — could ring in my ears? How many times could I ascend the cab, clutch my lapel with my right hand, and make that speech of gratitude and celebration, the speech which schoolchildren, 50 years in the future, would still be reciting, tears in their eyes?

     It had to end. The expensive champagnes, mixed with ginger ale and sherbet and run through a blender the morning after parties. The women, wrapped in one of my Thai silk robes, quaffing big plastic cups of the frosty mixture, their eyes sparkling. The constant demands from the publisher. I once read how Hunter S. Thompson was locked in hotel rooms and forced to write. And I was too, the motorcycle couriers, in their black riding boots, fidgeting, clasping their gloved hands together and gunning their engines, staring up at a single lighted window, high in the hotel, where I would feverishly type away, machine-gun fast, each page reverently plucked from the thick carpeting as it falls out of the typewriter platen and immediately hurried to the printing plant.

     Finally, with a single slap of the screen door—the wood weathered, the screen slightly bowed out—I knew it was time to move on. Breakdown was near. Not a Frances Farmer, hair in my face, crescent-of-eye-white-under-fluttering-lids sort of breakdown, of course, with burly attendants lifting me off the floor and slamming me into a straightjacket. Not that. Something more refined. After several nights and days of my leading conga lines into swimming pools, upsetting tables of carefully-arranged hors d’oeuvres, and gunning the blue Mercedes across manicured lawns, my army of loved ones would conspire to send me away for a “rest.” Exhausted, I protest only feebly. A slight flourish of the hand as I’m packed, swooning, into the back of the sleek black limousine, which zips silently through the dark, empty Manhattan streets and into the progressively sunnier, ever-more-lovely countryside. When I awake, it is a new and unfamiliar, though not unpleasant, world.

    The lap rug is ... plaid, my hands pale and rather thin against it. Deidre, my nurse, hears me stir and looks up from her embroidery, smiling, her dear face framed by the crisply starched ends of her white nurse’s cap. “You’ve been asleep a long time,” she says, in her honeyed voice, like a wind chime on a summer’s night. She pours the tea. From far across the wide, wide green lawn of the sanitarium, the sea can be heard, a faint roar.

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