What a gas!

     This story is why I still love my job. On Monday morning I knew basically nothing about helium. Then my boss said, "write something about the helium cliff" and the next thing I knew I was talking to a range of people from Boeing to Loyola University Medical Center, from the U.S. Senate to a balloon company, plus of course reading up on helium. It may be the ideal news story, for me, a blend of both bumbling by Congress AND details about one of the more interesting elements. 

     Helium is the second-most-abundant substance in the universe; roughly 23 percent of the mass of everything that exists is helium. So it reflects a certain perverse genius on the part of the U.S. Congress that it has managed to blunder us into a looming helium shortage.

     This issue is nothing new — industries that use helium, of which there are a surprising number, from aerospace to medicine to party balloons — have been dealing with supply problems and price spikes for years.

     “There’s tons of it on Jupiter,” said Christine Doolin, co-owner of Doolin Amusement Supply, 511 N. Halsted, which sells tanks of the noble gas, or tries to. “We don’t get as many tanks as we want, and haven’t for a year and a half.” She said that a large tank that sold a few years back for $95 now costs $200, and so her customers are using less.

     The immediate crisis — some call it the “helium cliff” — is this: the U.S. government, through its Federal Helium Reserve, supplies roughly half the helium in the United States and a third of the world’s.

     That spigot will turn off, completely, on Oct. 8, thanks to a well-intentioned but operationally disastrous law designed to force the government out of the helium business so private industry could take over. The Helium Privatization Act of 1996 compels the United States to sell off its reserves and exit the market as soon as it recouped the $1.3 billion it managed to lose selling helium, primarily because it set the price too low (which also is what kept other players out of the market). The assumption was that other suppliers of helium would crop up by the time the debt was paid. But strong demand, coupled with the feds raising the price, trying to spur others to supply helium, meant that the debt was eliminated early, in the fiscal year ending this Sept. 30. Which means, by law, the helium flow stops a week later.
     "We want to emphasize the urgency of the situation," said David Isaacs, vice president of government affairs for the Semiconductor Industry Association in Washington, D.C., representing the $150 billion American industry. "There is a lot of talk about deadlines in Washington, but this is a real deadline. If this reserve was to go offline, it would create problems."
     A variety of local companies would be adversely affected. Medical image scanners account for a third of the helium market.
     "We do have concerns," said Dr. Scott Mirowitz, chairman of radiology at Loyola University Health System, which operates nine MR scanners. "There's quite a bit of helium in MR scanners." Super cold helium keeps the powerful magnets cool. Shortages would mean the $2 million machines couldn't be operated without risk of damage or inaccuracies.
     Boeing uses helium to test for leaks in fuel tanks and to heat-treat landing gear parts.     

     "Because of the importance of refined helium to the U.S. economy, Boeing shares the concerns that industrial and government users have expressed about a potential disruption to the global supply of helium," said Angie Yoshimura, a Boeing spokeswoman. "Steps should be taken by Congress to reauthorize funding to operate the Federal Helium program to ensure a smooth transition over the next several years to a full-commercial marketplace for helium."
     Hope seems justified. The House has passed a law to buy more time. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee passed its version in June. And the expectation is that the Senate will race to act in September when it returns from its break.
     "The good news is that Congress has given every indication that it wants to prevent this helium cliff," said Keith Chu, press secretary for the Senate committee.
     One response could be relief. Or you could use this as a cautionary tale of what happens when government runs markets—though the United States entered the helium business in 1925 when there wasn't one, and it worked well for decades. The government's reserve is still the only significant long-term storage facility for crude helium in the world.
     The bad news, in my view, is that this crisis ever loomed, and what it says about our leaders. Even if we dodge this bullet is no occasion for self-congratulation. Our government should function better than this.
     In 2010, the National Research Council did a study to examine what effect the U.S. government shutting down its helium operation would have on industry, and concluded that its exit would be so disruptive that, for the first time, the United States would become an importer of helium from the two regions that have stepped up their helium production.
     Those two regions are Russia and the Middle East.

Why pie is better than cake

      Eloquence takes many forms — poetic descriptions of nature, deep philosophical ruminations about life, clear-eyed explanations of complex situations. But sometimes eloquence can be very brief, a flash of insight, a simple blunt statement. Churchill's "Never give up." The Delphic oracle's: "Know thyself."
     It was that last variety that struck me Sunday during a Twitter conversation with my old pal, Phil Rosenthal, for years at the Sun-Times, now ensconced at the Tribune. I had posted an ode to Tastykakes prepackaged pies, noting the Philadelphia treat is impossible to find in Chicago, and Phil felt he had seen them at a certain Philly-based fast food joint. During the discussion that followed, he tweeted a single, three word sentence, almost as a non-sequitur: "I want pie."
     A straightforward expression. Yet it bowled me over, coming as a revelation, almost an epiphany. I read it and immediately thought: "My God! Yes, he's right. I want pie too. I've always wanted pie. That's all any of us ever want. Pie."
     You don't know this as a child, when your addiction to chocolate and sweets makes you prefer cake. And there is something dense and rich and devastatingly wonderful about a thick slice of deep, dark chocolate cake — think of the kind of cakes they lovingly craft at House of Fine Chocolates, on Broadway in East Lake View. For several years after we moved from the city, we'd return to House of Fine Chocolates, to pick up birthday cakes — with the raspberry filling, natch. And it was a sign of bonds breaking when we stopped making the trek. 
    My tastes had shifted anyway. I had set aside sweetness, with childish things, and gone for the more complex intermingling of a good pie — the tartness of fruit filling, the solidity of crust, so much more substantial than mere cake. And the glory of that tip, so perfect.  
     In recent years, we're even done away with the cliche of birthday cake. My wife has been baking birthday pies, such as the sour cherry example above — to me, sour cherry is the ne plus ultra of pies, though I had a wonderful blueberry pie on our visit out East, baked by a Berea friend who knows of my affection for blueberry pie, the blueberries both substantial and evanescent, dissolving at the touch of a fork, simultaneously there and not there, like some Quantum mechanics riddle. 
     There is another connection between particle physics and pie. Working on two stories in recent years I just completely dropped the ball, as a writer, and for the same reason. One was when I spent the day at Fermilab, talking to physicists about this Top Higgs Boson they were seeking. At the end of the day, I realized I was still completely in the dark — I still had no idea what they were doing, no idea what this mysterious thing they were looking for might be. I never wrote anything about the Higgs. I had been overwhelmed.
     And the second was spending a few hours watching Paula Haney make dough at Hoosier Mama Pie Company on West Chicago Avenue. There, I roughly understood what was happening — she was baking these really good pies, in a bakery so dedicated to pies that it only sold pies, both sweet and savory, luncheon pies. She knew the secret to great pie is great crust, and had this complex philosophy of crust-making, which she explained to me and I understood, sort of.

     And I left filled with ambition, a front page Food section pie story, pitting Haney's vision of crust versus other crust masters, Sarah Stegner at Prairie Grass, and Gale Gand at Tru, and such. The vista of my grand pie story lay before me and glittered, the definitive crust expose, blowing the lid off the entire Chicago situation, pie-wise.  Then I was swept away into my daily duties and the vision was lost. I never wrote anything about Hoosier Mama. Wracked with guilt, I pointed a young couple I knew who were doing  these lovely on-line kitchen tours for WBEZ toward Hoosier Mama, and they at least gave Paula some publicity, so I didn't feel quite so bad.
     I try not to think about it. Try not to think about pie. As much as I love pie, I force myself to wait for pie to come to me, for the birthday to roll around, or to blunder into a restaurant that happens to offer really good pie. Because once I start looking for it; once I activate the "seek pie" circuit in my brain, it would be all I'd ever do. My eyes would slide open in the morning, and I'd think, "I want pie" — the imperative so eloquently expressed by Phil Rosenthal. So I have to block the concept of pie out, most times. this present post notwithstanding, and focus on whatever mundane, non-pie task is in front of me, and demand my brain be distracted by lesser thoughts, thoughts that aren't of pie. That's the grown-up way, I suppose. I'd hate to have too much pie. As if such a thing were possible. 
         

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.