Cops not only answer to Chicago violence

     High school students volunteer more nowadays than when I was a kid.  No so much because they’re better than we were, though I think they are. Their schools not only make them do it, but colleges also expect it. Setting aside the conundrum of mandatory volunteerism, it is interesting to see the projects students come up with. Last weekend a pal of my older son’s threw a charity chess tournament. Another dug out buckthorn in a Cook County forest preserve.

     My high school senior wondered what he should do and I suggested The Night Ministry, the last line defense providing health care and food to Chicago’s impoverished and downtrodden. They have a mobile medical clinic on a bus that goes around the city. Volunteers—often from church groups—coordinate to be at each stop, waiting with food.

     Some of the stops require 200 meals, but Back-of-the-Yards is new on their circuit, so they suggested 20 suppers, which seemed more doable for an 18-year-old’s meal-making skills. He needed a helper to hand out the food, so I went along. It seemed prudent.

      Being a meticulous sort, I built in extra time for traffic. But 94 was fairly clear, so we got to the corner of 54th and Halsted at 8:15, a half hour early. Nothing to do but park and wait. The boy popped on his reading light and lost himself in his New Yorker. I watched the street scene, which was largely empty. Weedy lots, a bar of some kind directly ahead, people coming and going.

     The thing that really struck me were the police. Squad cars came by every minute or two. Up and down Halsted. Cruising in from side streets. One stopped for a long time in the alley across the lot to our right.

     Lots of cops. Still, most of the time, the cops weren’t there. Chicago is an enormous place. And it occurred to me, that the violence, which seems poised to explode this summer—Chicago had one weekend with 52 shootings in April—is presented as a police problem. If we get X amount of police to do Y, then this will get better. I’m not so sure that’s true. I think it’s more a case of police being one of the few things that can actually be controlled by the city. Focusing on police is an example of the adage, When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
     When people ask me my thoughts, I say "jobs." People with jobs are less inclined to go around shooting others randomly. I thought that was the smart, informed reply, but with a dozen shootings some nights, it also seems so hopelessly long-term as to be almost callous. Sure, good jobs would help. So would a pony. Guys won't be shooting so much if they're tending to their ponies.
     Part of me wants to say, "try everything." Curb the illegal guns flowing into the city, seize the ones already here, mobilize churches, prod fearful neighborhoods to take back their streets from gang-bangers and support their efforts with police.
     Another part wants to observe that this isn't something officialdom is going to sweep in and fix. Just as civil rights progress took countless individual acts of courage among people who sat down at lunch counters, in the front of buses, refused to be second-class citizens, so stemming violence is going to take individuals putting themselves at risk by standing up.   Kids shooting at each other are being failed by their families—heck, the fact that a 14-year-old was, allegedly, given the gun she used, supposedly, to kill her friend, should be a cause of echoing shock. Not shrugged off and forgotten. People in Englewood and Roseland need to realize this: The rest of the city doesn't care, not really, because it's not happening to them. Expressions of concern are mostly disingenuous attempts by people to wash their hands of the problem and feign compassion. Residents must be the ones who care. If family, friends and neighbors of a kid hanging with gangbangers won't stop him, what am I supposed to do?
     I'm not saying it's easy. But this problem needs a cultural shift. I've seen Chief Keef videos extolling guns and the thug life. I've never seen a comic mocking gangs, and how inhuman and idiotic they are. I don't think ridicule is going to end gang violence. But it is part of the "try everything" program.
     When I asked the boy what he took away from his Night Ministry experience, at first he just shrugged, as teens do. What about the people begging for an extra sandwich, I asked? The one instruction we were given about handing out meals was that people would ask for more than one, and we weren't to give in. As it was we were stripped of every scrap we brought and had to use the reserves on the bus. One man refused to budge. "Please," he said, staring hard at us, hand out. "Please. Please." We stood our ground; other people were in line. What about that part? I asked my son. Well, yeah, he said, there was that.

These bicycles are brought to you by....

     Here's a contradiction: I love brands but hate branding. 
     Certain products, packing, logos and labels simply have a beauty to them: Heinz ketchup in a glass bottle. The Tabasco sauce label. The Apple iMac. Ketchup in a plain glass bottle would seem generic, wrong.
     Liking the product itself can be secondary; I don't smoke but admire the Lucky Strikes pack.
     But it's somehow different when some non-product is slapped with a logo. A shiver goes down my back when  a heretofore unbranded space become branded. It seems bad, the seizing of public space by private enterprise.  I complained first and loudest that Chicago got nothing for its bike system while New York pried $42 million from CitiBank—hence "Citi Bikes." But now that Blue Cross/Blue Shield has stepped up, almost a year after the Divvy program commenced and is slapping its name on the bikes, well, I'm torn.
    Yes, the $12.5 million is helpful, for more bike stations and bike lanes. A tad more than a quarter of what New York got —we'll try not to think about that.
     But something about it...maybe because Blue Cross/Blue Shield has particularly ugly logos. A stick figure crucified on a crude blue cross, and the snake-on-a-stick caduceus. And what kind of company has two logos? You'd think they'd combine them into one decent logo.
     Maybe it's the year? We've bonded with Divvy, at least I have, and now it's changing. Maybe the change itself is unsettling. The United Center came into the world as the United Center, and therefore seems benign. If it had been the Bulls Center, first, that might have been different. It would be like the parents of a 1-year-old baby announcing that no, he isn't Charlie anymore, he's Ben. It would be weird.
     So maybe it's the retrofitting the brand onto the up-and-running sky blue image of the Divvys that's vexatious. Or it's a reminder that our government is broke and needs to raise cash, and this is how we like to do it. Taxes bad, branding good. So our communal space sells off parts of itself with a whiff of cowardice to boot. Hidden fees, fines, tickets, ads, anything that can't be called a "tax" by a political opponent.
      Maybe the worry is that someday our culture will resemble a NASCAR race car, festooned with sponsors. The bike system now, parks later. At least it's not school buses, not yet. Other places have tried that. Double unsettling, because kids are involved. "Attention class. This restroom break is sponsored by Gatorade..." I suppose we should be lucky it's not currency, not yet. The postal service has already sold off space on stamps to whoever wants it—and the joke is, few do.
     The logo started showing up on bikes last week, cluttered and unbeautiful and unwelcome.
     I suppose we'll get used to them. Or perhaps when the Blue Cross sponsorship is up in 2019, it will pass to other "blue" themed companies. Jet Blue, Blue Moon Brewing, IBM ("Big Blue," remember?).
     Maybe in time it'll even seem natural. The Wrigley Field name is so sacrosanct people forget it's hawking a brand of gum. But it is.

Saying goodbye to books

     Books are worth less.

     Not worthless, I rush to point out. Worth less. An important space between those two words. Still worth something, but not worth what they once were.

     That’s been obvious for some time. Being a bookish guy, I resisted admitting it. Struggled to believe that physical books — pages of paper, covers, possessing both mass and volume — have an intrinsic value that will conquer the destructive twins of time and technology. Books would survive the Web revolution for the same reason violins survive: they perform better than a facsimile.

     Now I’m not so sure.

     It started as a tickle. Standing in Half Price Books in Highland Park a few years back. So big, and the books were so cheap.

     Almost . . . too . . . cheap.

     This is a transitional phase, I began to realize. Half Price Books will occupy the margin between the books that customers tote in by the bagful to sell and the ones they buy and carry out, until the books start backing up, as more people want to sell, but fewer want to buy a hardback for $12, or $6, or $3 or $1.50. When a bunch of electrons can be had for nearly nothing, those readers are going to keep asking themselves “Why?” The margin will keep getting thinner. Eventually books will be used for insulation if not fuel.  

     Traditions change. Look at what employees carry their stuff in. A decade ago backpacks were for students. Now someone carrying a leather briefcase — heavy, expensive, limited — is practically indulging in an affectation. He might as well carry an ebony cane and wear a cape while he’s at it.

     To know where books are going, quite fast, all you have to do is look at the statistics. In 2008, 1 percent of book sales were e-books. In 2012, 23 percent of the revenue of the $7 billion book trade was from e-books. Nearly a quarter. Extend that graph out.
     Though it was only last week that I really felt the tremor underfoot.
     On the surface, it was good news, a win for the dusty volumes crowd. The New York Public Library announced it would not, as it had planned, offload its millions of books to New Jersey and turn the ornate Main Reading Room, two blocks long at its 42nd Street flagship, into a computer center. They had spent $9 million on plans for the change.
     So, relief. But I also felt that odd tickle.
     Last summer I was in New York, at the Main Reading Room, dragging my younger son (the way a normal man gathers ballparks, I wanted to add a third Gutenberg Bible to our trip, alongside the Morgan Library's and the Beinecke Library's at Yale. I hope that doesn't constitute child abuse).
     I enjoyed just seeing the place. And yet — and this is the earthquake — I think keeping it the way it is probably is a mistake. The books should rest in New Jersey.
     Why? Twenty years ago, I was researching a book on college pranks. Perhaps the best prank in the book occurred in 1902, when a drinking club at Yale, the Jolly Eight, tricked stern, ax-wielding saloon foe Carry Nation into thinking they were a temperance band, and she was their guest for a day on campus. At evening, they took a photo of her, supposedly toasting to temperance with a glass of water. They airbrushed a cigarette in her hand, as if she were partying with her Bulldog buddies. The Yale Record ran the photo with the caption, " 'I have always taken mine straight,' she said, laughing."
     A fun, satisfying prank. But there was one loose thread: Did Nation ever realize she'd been duped at Yale? Turns out she wrote an autobiography in 1908, "The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation." It is a rare book — you couldn't get it through interlibrary loan. But the New York Public Library had a copy. So I flew to New York to read it. At the Reading Room, you request books, and they bring them to you. I remember sitting at a table in that vast hall, being handed a pair of boards tied together with a blue ribbon. I tugged at the bow. There was the book. I turned to the table of contents, at Chapter XVII started to laugh, out loud, in the otherwise silent hall. Its title? "THE VICES OF COLLEGES, ESPECIALLY YALE." Guess she found out what happened.
     Last week, when I heard the news, I had a hunch and went over to Google Books.
     Sure enough. There it is, Carry Nation's autobiography. You can look at it yourself with a few taps. No plane trip necessary.
     That's far better. Scarcity creates value, but as much as I cherish the memory of that journey, I wouldn't impose it on others.
     Times change and we change with them. That thought was penned, using ink and a nib, by John Owen in 1622. It's as true written on parchment as it is set in type as it is painted upon the screen in electrons.

Fred Cohn: "He was the best. He was a star."

     For some reason obituaries have a bad reputation, as the lowest rung of the newsroom pecking order. I guess that's from the day when they were obligatory renditions of the good works of ladies in the sewing club. But obituaries are allowed to be interesting nowadays, and I love learning about the life of someone I either didn't know or was just vaguely familiar with. When I first looked into this, I had no idea who Fred Cohn was—my connection was I knew his son Yale. What I'm most proud of is that when I phoned Ed Genson, I didn't know that he knew Cohn—I just guessed he probably did, and was right. Ditto for Paul Biebel. This story was researched and written between 9 a.m. and 11:45 a.m. Friday, including two trips down to the clip file in the basement of the building, the second because I had the wrong key the first time. Let's see a computer aggregator do that.

     If Fred Cohn was defending you, you were in trouble.

Fred Cohn and his wife Mary on their wedding day.

     Not for any lack of skill on the part of the University of Chicago- trained criminal defense lawyer.

     “He was the best,” said Timothy Evans, chief judge of Cook County Circuit Court. “He was a star.”

     But Cohn represented some of the toughest cases, such as the 1969 robbery trial of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. If you were facing the death penalty, if you were caught with the shotgun smoking in your hands, if you had killed a cop — or been beaten by one — you wanted Fred Cohn on your side.

     “A singularly outstanding lawyer, an excellent appellate lawyer,” said Judge Paul Biebel, presiding judge of the Criminal Division of the Cook County Circuit Court. “He had a great knowledge of criminal law, and was one of the last of the old breed who would take cases simply because they felt this person needed to be defended.”

     Cohn, 75, died April 30 at Evanston Hospital after a long struggle with cancer.

     He was born in Brooklyn, came to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago and then graduated from its law school in 1962. He went to work for the Cook County public defender’s office, leaving in the mid-1960s to work for flamboyant criminal defense lawyer Julius “Lucky” Echeles.

     “He was Julius’ guy,” said Ed Genson, a top Chicago criminal defense lawyer, who called Cohn “a lawyer’s lawyer” and a wonderful man with a gift for friendship.

     “We were sort of brothers,” Genson said.
      A big, round, affable man, Cohn approached his work as a vocation, and often tried to rehabilitate and reform his clients, helping them get jobs and turn their lives around.
     "He was such a good man," Genson said. "He felt sorry for everybody he represented. Everybody charged was a victim, every person he wanted to protect."
     After the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in June 1964, Cohn went South and worked as a volunteer civil rights attorney for the summer.
     "He believed everyone had a right to vote," said his wife of 42 years, Mary Cohn. "He knew the situation in the South and felt he could contribute. He felt very strongly about civil rights his whole life."
     The two met in Evanston — Mary Derra was a nurse from Streater; he was running a legal aid office on the same floor as the visiting nurses association office where she worked. The nurses were always good for coffee and cigarettes, and Cohn would pop in for both, eventually taking his future wife to an open house at the Gateway Foundation rehab facility.
     "We knew zip about drug addicts," she said. Cohn was a fervent opponent of drug use who once threw a pair of drug dealers out of a party after he recognized them.
     Cohn was Hampton's attorney at the time he was killed, and represented other Black Panther Party members as well.
     He also taught criminal law and procedure at John Marshall Law School.
     "He was one of my instructors at John Marshall," Evans said. "He was committed to every avenue of justice you can imagine. He was a trial lawyer, primarily on the defense side, but was committed to fairness on all sides. He was my good friend for 40 years. He had a big heart. "
     Cohn lived in Edgewater and was involved in the community — he was chairman of the Edgewater-Uptown Building Task Force, trying to keep up housing standards. He was known to help neighbors with their legal problems for free, or in return for baked goods, home repair and stuffed peppers.
     Genson said that, during the unrest surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he witnessed Cohn trying to calm the participants.
     "At one end of Grant Park, the policemen were on one side, the demonstrators on the other, and there was Fred in the middle, screaming that they should all sit down and negotiate," said Genson. "And then they charged. For the life of me, I can't understand why he didn't get hurt. He was trying to negotiate. That was Fred. He didn't want anybody to hurt each other."
     "In lieu of flowers, do a mitzvah," said his son Yale, using the Yiddish word for "good deed." "Take someone you love to movies and ice cream. That's what he would do."
     Survivors beside his wife, Mary, and son, Yale, include daughter Kate. The memorial service is private.

Saturday fun activity: Where (and who) IS this?

    Computers, for all their magic, still have a hard time puzzling out a human face, something we humans do continually with speed and accuracy. I happened upon these two large, illuminated photographs in the public area of a well-known building while going about my business on Friday. Of course I instantly recognized the woman in the left as Marilyn Monroe. But—somewhat unsettling to me—I also recognized the couple on the right. At first doing so almost made me feel bad, the realization that I am of an age where I would immediately know who he was. There is a thin line between having historical knowledge at your fingertips and being a bore trafficking in trivia. 
     Which made me wonder if I was alone, being able to place this couple, or whether readers here would instantly recognize them as well. They should—he was once one of the most famous men in the world. And she, well, her dad was pretty famous. The question for today is in three parts: a)who is he?; b) who is she? and c) where is this tableau to be found? The first person to answer all three wins a Every Goddamn Day poster. Place your answers in the comments section below. Good luck. 

Tilting tourists atop the Hancock Center

     There are two Chicagos. Or, rather, many pairs of Chicagos. Some are well known: North Side Chicago and South Side Chicago; black Chicago and white Chicago; rich Chicago and poor.

     Others, are not so well-known. One of the less-recognized Chicago pairs is the city of 2.7 million Chicagoans and a parallel Tourist Chicago, a densely populated land of nearly 50 million transient residents who come each year to the city to eat pizza, ride Segways, puzzle over maps, wander downtown, fill American Girl bags, munch churros at Navy Pier, ask questions in German and take double-decker bus tours to learn of our city’s patron saint, Al Capone.

     A new star in the firmament of Tourist Chicago winked into existence this week as Tilt! — the exclamation point is theirs — an attraction on the 94th floor observation deck of the John Hancock Center, opened for business.

     Tilt! is a section of the south face of the observation deck, redubbed 360Chicago, with positions for eight riders, or, rather, standers, who hold onto handrails while the entire glass and steel facade slowly tips forward 30 degrees, allowing customers to look down the side of the building, at the roof of Water Tower Place.
    “Everybody was sweating; it gives you great perspective,” said Ald. Bob Fioretti (2nd), one of about 100 VIPs, media members and guests who attended the champagne ribbon cutting Thursday, and who was among the first to officially try the device, which has been available to the public since Saturday.
     “This is the culmination of a lot of work,” said Eric Deutsch, vice president at Montparnasse 56 USA, the American division of a French company that owns tourist attractions, including the Hancock observation deck. He said that nothing like Tilt! exists elsewhere in the world.
     Local tourist officials on hand predicted that visitors will come to Chicago from all over the world, partially in the hopes of trying out the Hancock’s new attraction.
     “This is going to be another driver,” said Don Welsh, president of Choose Chicago. “We need to have additional demand generators, things that cause people from around the world to want to come to Chicago.”
     Project engineer Christian DeFazio, of the Chicago office of the Thornton Tomasetti engineering firm, said the Tilt! structure weighs 30,000 pounds and is moved by three large hydraulic cylinders, the sort found on construction cranes. DeFazio said this project was a change for his company, which did the engineering work on Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, because what they build is typically static — aka, not moving — while with Tilt! “there was the kinetic side” that demanded testing in a wind tunnel.
     He dismissed concern that the 25-foot-long glass and steel box could tumble out, noting it was designed with help from the city, with “all of the code requirements and a very high comfort level of safety factors.”
     One of the great challenges of its construction, DeFazio said, was getting it up to the 94th floor. Hauling it on a crane would have been prohibitively expensive, so they designed it in three pieces and brought it up through the Hancock’s freight elevator.
     DeFazio said operators can program how long the tilt lasts, and right now the trip takes about 30 seconds, which means that at $5 per admission, not counting the $18 ticket to get to the observation deck, visitors from are paying $600 an hour to gaze down the side of a tall building while bracing a push-up, a business model that would be the envy of the old clip joint operators, and is perhaps fitting in the town that invented the Mickey Finn.
     For those who wonder if Chicago is indeed among the firmament of world-class cities, reflect that the ribbon cutting of what in essence is the briefest, slowest and most expensive carnival ride in the world, albeit one situated very high, drew 100 people and eight TV cameras, and was splashed across the entire front page of one of the city’s major newspapers.
     I did try it, taking the handholds as the pistons nudged eight of us forward together. It reminded me of the old Catskills joke about a restaurant patron who complains about lousy food “and in such small portions.” That said, I imagine people who suffer from vertigo or acrophobia, or who are excitable teenagers, might find Tilt! thrilling. Let’s just say that I suspect this is exactly the sort of thing tourists love. I hope it is, and that it keeps them entertained and off the streets in the awkward hour between stocking up at the Hershey’s store and heading to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch.

Better a blemish on your record than no record at all

     If I had to sum up the challenge of being a newspaper columnist in one sentence, I'd say, "Be edgy but not insane." You want to offer provocative thoughts that keep people talking—and reading—without saying crazy things that will either cause them to rightly dismiss you or that might get yourself fired.
      Thus I try to step back, from time to time, and look at my opinions, to make sure they aren't drifting from strong into rigid, not going from unexpected to unhinged, or straying from consistent into repetitive. Which I did the other day regarding the upcoming gubernatorial campaign between Gov. Pat Quinn and Bruce Rauner, the Republican challenger. Or tried to.

Chicago Botanic Garden,  May 4, 2014

      To me the race seems pretty clear. You have Quinn, the former brick-throwing reformer who, through complete happenstance, was elevated from the meaningless sinecure of lieutenant governor  after Rod Blagojevich swan-dived into prison, to the Herculean task of governor. For the first year or two, I hooted at Quinn, this goo-goo blinking in innocent puzzlement at the levers of power, a guy who, in my estimation, was good at criticizing, bad at the brawny arm-twisting involved in actually getting stuff done.
     Then a funny thing happened.
     Quinn, to everyone's amazement, managed to hold off the challenge of right wing dinosaur Bill Brady, and began to actually accomplish things. He achieved essential pension reform, a necessity that so far has mostly danced out of the reach of far-more-nimble politician Rahm Emanuel. He signed gay marriage into law despite his Catholic upbringings. And in general proved a smart leader and a decent man—something in short supply in politics.
     Then you have Bruce Rauner, another bored Republican rich guy sent up from Central Casting, looking for a cherry to put on top of his career. Rauner has no experience in government whatsoever and, like Tea Partiers everywhere, feels that this is an asset, since they hate government and want to be elected so they can dismantle it. You don't need to be a carpenter to tear a house down. His followers demand that we  "Give him a chance" as if being governor of Illinois were a pick-up kickball game and Rauner the new kid who just showed up and is shyly grinding his toe into the dirt by home plate.
     You wouldn't pick a doctor that way. Nor would you, in the middle of surgery, if the patient took a turn for the worse, call in another surgeon, since this one obviously isn't working. You stick with the guy doing the operating.
     Yet. Having delivered a number of kicks to Rauner, I began to worry that this was a rut I was sliding into, that I was becoming shrill—there's enough shrill already without my adding to it—and just as I was wondering if I hadn't made myself too comfortable in the trench I had dug on the governor's side, along comes news of the botched Neighborhood Recovery Initiative anti-violence program that Quinn funded to the tune of $54.5 million. 
     The timing of the funding looks political—designed to push Quinn in black communities in the 2010 election. Not that a black person would vote for Bill Brady under any circumstance, that would be like, in 1938...no, I'm not going there. But something had to get people out and to the polls. The thing was run by Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown's husband, Benton Cook III, who turned out to be a convicted felon, as revealed by my colleagues in the Sun-Times.
     Welllllll, I thought. This looks bad for Quinn. And I wondered: Could this be the time to jump over to Rauner? I don't want to be one of those guys who clings to his cause even harder as it goes up in flames. Cognitive dissonance —I hate that. At least Rauner downplays the usual litany of right wing social engineering. So far. 
     And then I wondered. This scandal is being placed at Quinn's feet because ... why? Because it happened in Illinois under his watch—a span that covers the past five plus years. He didn't collude with Cook, at worst he addressed violence in a fashion designed to help him, politically, and then didn't pay attention to how it was administered. Which makes sense, since he has the entire state to think about; he isn't the guy who was supposed to keep an eye on Dorothy Brown's husband, at least not directly. Yes, the buck stops with Quinn, but if that's the worst thing he's done, then it isn't an indictment, it's an endorsement. The worst thing his two predecessors have done landed them both in prison. 
     Which brings us back to Rauner, who can't have anything  good, bad or indifferent laid at his feet because he hasn't done anything in Illinois beyond make a pile of money for himself. That's worse than a scandal, isn't it? If the man cares so much now, where has he been? Should a person's first elected office be governor? The Republicans sure cared about experience when it was Barack Obama running. Rauner makes Obama seem like Claude Pepper. But he wants to manage the state, a job that even a straight-arrow, do-gooder like Pat Quinn sometimes has trouble managing, as this scandal demonstrates. To be honest, this problem is a reminder that we need someone in office who knows what he's doing, generally, as opposed to a guy who says the job is easy and he'll do it better because he has never tried before.  I'd rather trust Pat Quinn with a black spot on his five-year record of service than Bruce Rauner with no spots because he has no record.  Returning to the doctor metaphor, who would you rather operate on you:: a doctor who had one of his thousands of patients die? Or a doctor who has never treated anybody at all? I know who I'd pick. Still.