Jane Byrne, Chicago's first woman mayor, dies.

     Jane Byrne was not mighty, like her mentor, Richard J. Daley.
     She was not beloved, like her successor, Harold Washington.
     Nor was she long-serving, like her bitter rival, Richard M. Daley.
     But she was mayor, Chicago’s first and only female mayor — making Chicago the largest city in the United States to elect a female chief executive — serving a single, tempestuous term, ushering the city into the 1980s, leaving her own colorful legacy during a time of political change, social upheaval and financial crisis.
     Byrne, 81, died Friday in hospice care. She had been in poor health in recent years, suffering a stroke in January 2013.
     The average Chicagoan recalling the Jane Byrne era remembers her for the popular city traditions she initiated — she loved parties and lavish entertainments. She created the festival that became Taste of Chicago and initiated the return of farmers markets to downtown.
     She was famous for moving into one of the Cabrini Green high-rises and living there, briefly, in an effort to draw attention to gang violence in public housing. She also pushed to ban handguns in Chicago.
     Crime was just one of many serious urban problems Byrne faced. During her first three months in office, unions representing the city's transit workers, public school teachers and firefighters each went on strike, one after the other.
     Labor strife was among the blows that hard reality struck after the thrill of her election, a stunning victory — the defeat of a sitting mayor, Michael Bilandic, by a 5-foot-3 woman who, 16 months earlier, had been Chicago's first commissioner of consumer sales, weights and measures, not exactly the kind of job that traditionally serves as a launching pad for political glory.    
      "I beat the whole goddamned Machine single-handed!" Byrne exulted when she won the Democratic nomination in February 1979, upsetting Bilandic, who had famously left the streets unplowed following a major snowstorm that dumped two feet of snow on the city, snarling roads, stopping trains and closing the airports. Making Byrne's victory all the more sweet was the fact it had been Bilandic who fired her from her city job after she accused his administration of shady dealings with taxicab companies.
     The Democratic primary was the true race, as usual in Chicago, with the general election a mere formality. That spring, Byrne crushed Republican Wallace Johnson with a staggering 82 percent of the vote, the biggest majority in modern Chicago mayoral history. It was the first time since 1927 that the candidate slated by the Democratic machine didn't win the mayor's office.
     Byrne prevailed despite the considerable sexism of the time. She was openly and unapologetically mocked by her enemies in such terms as "that crazy broad" and "that skinny bitch" and worse, slurs that wounded her.
     She felt that her difficult term in office was made even more so because of her gender.
     "There is always a testing of the new kid on the block in politics," she wrote in her 1992 autobiography, "My Chicago." "I was certain the testing was a bit tougher because of my sex."
     Winning as a maverick who had bucked the system, Byrne initially pushed for reform. But after being thwarted in her attempts to advance her agenda, she was drawn to the power structure she had fought against.
     "She was somewhat overwhelmed by her victory and to an extent frightened by it," remembered Don Rose, a key adviser. "She found the easy way was to be led by the [Ald. Edward] Vrdolyaks and [CHA Chairman Charles] Swibels into the swamp of the old politics."
     The Tribune once referred to her administration as "a Bonnie and three Clydes," the third Clyde being John D'Arco, alderman of the mob-ridden 1st Ward.
     "An erratic and stormy person, she kept the city quaking during her first administration," wrote Nobel laureate Saul Bellow. "Appointees hired and fired without rhyme or reason whirled in and out of the revolving doors."
     "As mayor, she proved a great disappointment," Leon Despres, the progressive 5th Ward alderman, wrote, noting that she "entered office on a wave of popular support" having triumphed over the Machine, which she called "an evil cabal."
     But she abruptly cut a deal with the aldermen who ran the Council.
     "From then on, she was more their captive than their executive," Despres wrote.
     Time, though, softened the trials of the Byrne years, and when she turned 81 she was remembered fondly by the city she led, with the Circle Interchange and the park next to the Water Tower named in her honor.
     The future mayor was born Margaret Jane Burke on May 24, 1933. She graduated from St. Scholastica High School in 1951 ("Janie Burke: Neat and nice" her yearbook dubbed her) and enrolled in St. Mary of the Woods in Terre Haute, Indiana, but the next year transferred to Barat College in Lake Forest because she missed her family. She studied science: biology and chemistry.
     On New Year's Eve 1956, she married a Marine pilot, Bill Byrne, and moved to Pensacola, Florida, while her husband took flight training. The couple later moved to Kingsville, Texas.
     Three years later, in May 1959, Byrne was with their daughter, Katherine, visiting her mother in Chicago when Bill Byrne was killed after his plane crashed into a cemetery while trying to land at the Glenview Naval Air Station.
     Her sister Carol had opened the Chicago office for John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, and Byrne began working there, eager to put a fellow Catholic in the White House. After Kennedy's assassination, she was taken under the wing of Richard J. Daley, though their first meeting did not go well.
     "Why did you go to them?" Daley asked her, indignant she had not instead applied her efforts to her local Democratic organization. "The Kennedys. Why did you go to them?" The meeting almost ended with Byrne angrily storming out of the mayor's office, but Daley called her back and a bond was formed, once she promised to ring doorbells and put up signs in her ward.
     In 1964, he put her on the Chicago Commission on Urban Opportunity, the city's reaction to Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty.
     Daley helped advance her career while she helped him by showing, during an era of growing feminism, that the Daley administration had women in positions of authority. He'd ask her "What do you hear out there?" and she would tell him.
     In 1968, she became chairman of the Department of Consumer Sales, Weights and Measures. She also rose in the Democratic Party, becoming a national committeewoman.
     She remarried, on St. Patrick's Day 1978, to Jay McMullen, a colorful Sun-Times reporter who had publicly praised her "great legs" and whose relationship with the future mayor was not without practical journalistic value.
     "There was a day when I could roll over in bed and scoop the Tribune," he told Esquire magazine at the time of their marriage.
     After her election, with the city awash in red ink, Byrne tried to save money on labor by paring city employees' cost-of-living increases. The result was widespread labor unrest: In December 1979, the transit union struck; in January 1980, Chicago Public School teachers went on strike; in February, it was the firefighters' turn.
     "To her discredit, Byrne handled all three strikes — transit, teachers, and firemen — in what to the public seemed to be a vacillating, then vindictive, and sometimes mean and small-minded manner," wrote Chicago historian Melvin Holli. "In all three affairs newsmen and the unions unflatteringly referred to her as 'Attila the Hen' or 'Calamity Jane.'"
     Byrne also drank, and certain decisions in office seemed to have been affected by that; many reporters had the experience of the inebriated mayor calling up to air a concern.
     She later admitted she had difficulty taking command.
     "At times I felt whipsawed and all but helpless in my effort to shake Chicago out of its inertial patterns," she wrote in her autobiography.
      The achievements of her administration included extending the 'L' line to O'Hare, where she began a $1 billion expansion project, as well as initial planning for the renewal of Navy Pier.
     There were also missteps. She promoted the ill-starred idea to put the city's main library in an abandoned Goldblatt's store, a plan scuttled only after a Sun-Times investigation showed the department store floors could not support the weight of books. She also pushed hard for a 1992 World's Fair in Chicago that, like a 2016 Chicago Olympics, was not to be.
     In 1983, she amassed a $9 million campaign war chest but was challenged in the Democratic primary by the Cook County state's attorney, Richard M. Daley, and Rep. Harold Washington, whose candidacy was in part provoked by Byrne herself, by her firing of two black members of the CHA board.
     "Some insiders felt that Byrne goaded the African-American community to put forward a black candidate that would take away from Rich Daley's support in the primary," Chicago historian Dominic Pacyga wrote. "If so, she made a drastic political mistake."
     Chicagoans turned out en masse for the February 1983 primary. Washington narrowly won, with 37 percent of the vote to Byrne's 33 percent and Daley's 30 percent.
     After Washington's first term, Byrne ran against him in 1987 in a bitter primary that saw her calling Washington a "disgrace" and Washington accusing Byrne of being "psychologically unfit" to be mayor and comparing her rhetoric to Hitler's.
     Outspent 6 to 1, Byrne lost to Washington, 47 to 53 percent.
     She flirted with running in 1989 but did not file the necessary petitions. In 1991 she did file but had difficulty raising funds—during one period, she raised $798 to Mayor Daley's $2.2 million.
     Jay McMullen died of lung cancer in 1992. The last 20 years of Jane Byrne's life were conducted largely out of the public eye. In 2000, she told a reporter she was busy spending time with her grandson, Willie. She made a brief appearance during Rahm Emanuel's May 16, 2011, mayoral inauguration.
     This year, "the forgotten mayor" was championed by Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed, who spearheaded a drive to honor Byrne. In August 2014, the Circle Interchange was renamed the Jane Byrne Interchange, and the City Council voted to change the name of the park around the Water Tower to Mayor Jane M. Byrne Plaza.
     "Jane Byrne didn't just blaze a new trail for women in politics," Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in July 2014. "She blazed a new trail forward to a better future for the entire city of Chicago."
     Services are pending.

Learning pacifism at the master's feet

   

Arun Gandhi at the Congress Plaza Hotel

     Someone from the Parliament of the World's Religions suggested I meet with Arun Gandhi, and I did Thursday because, really, how often do you have the chance to talk with someone who lived with Mohandas K. Gandhi? The one detail that I couldn't fit into the column is his saying that Gandhi himself never used the title "Mahatma" that is often associated with him. 

     "He didn't like that," Gandhi said, pointing out that Mahatma is Sanskrit for "saint"—"He would say, 'I'm not a saint; I'm a normal person.' But the people of India decided that one, and he couldn't live it down."

      

      Twelve is a tough age, and many a struggling preteen has been shipped off to relatives to help him adjust to this whirling ball of woe we call a world.

     In Arun’s case, two things made his relocation unusual. First, the relative he was sent to live with was in India, thousands of miles from his home in South Africa.

     And second, the relative was his grandfather, Mohandas K. Gandhi.

     “We faced the brunt of prejudice and hate,” said Arun Gandhi, in Chicago to help plan the next Parliament of the World’s Religions, to be held in October 2015 in Utah. “Being a young man, I didn’t know how to deal with it. I was very angry and wanted eye-for-eye justice. My parents decided it was time to go to India and give me an opportunity to live with my grandfather.”

     He lived with the world-famous pacifist for more than a year, until late 1947.

     “He taught me some lessons in that period, and in many ways laid the foundation for my life,” Gandhi said.

     What sort of lessons?

     “The first lesson he taught me was understanding anger, to channel it constructively. He didn’t deny anger, didn’t say anger was bad and suppress it. He said, ‘Anger is good.’ Anger is to the human being what oil is to the automobile. If we don’t put fuel into an automobile, it won’t run. If we don’t have anger, we won’t do anything. Anger is good, but what is bad is the way we abuse anger.”

     I had never heard it put that way.
     "We channel anger the way we channel electricity. Anger is just as deadly and destructive as electricity, but also could be just as good and useful if channeled constructively. We have never been taught about anger, so we get mad and do things that sometimes change the course of our lives."
     That makes anger very much like religion.
     "Religion has been misused and abused, to create hate and prejudice and killing in the name of God," said Gandhi. "We need to do something to bring religion back to love, respect, understanding and acceptance of each other, not hate and prejudice."
     Gandhi, 80, has devoted his life to fighting prejudice. He lives in Rochester, New York, but his Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute is based in Wauconda. Though his efforts are not without controversy. Gandhi was accused of prejudice himself in 2008, when he wrote that Jews and Israel were "the biggest players" in a culture of violence, which had critics recalling the pallid idiocy that his grandfather offered up to Germany's persecuted Jews in the 1930s, advising them to not flee, but to find joy in their oppression.
     "There is a misconception I'm anti-Jew," Gandhi said. "I'm not. I'm anti-violence."
     That's good enough for me. Though he promptly flipped the situation on its head.
     "I wasn't condemning the Jews or Israel," he continued. "The fact is, unless there is peaceful solution to the problem, we are going to get bogged down . . . if we see what is happening in the Middle East today, a lot of it is because of the Palestinian situation."
     Actually, the Palestinian situation is because of what has been happening in the Middle East, and anyone who believes otherwise, who dreams that should it by some miracle be settled, then the Middle East will become as placid as the Midwest, is still pointing fingers at Jews, though more slyly.
     Not to dwell on that. I like the idea that the Israel/Palestinian knot is so twisted that even a hereditary advocate of pacifism can find himself spouting disguised bigotries.
     I asked Gandhi about the importance of the Parliament, an institution that began in Chicago during the 1893 World's Fair.
     "We have to get people to start talking, to begin understanding each other and reaching out to each other," he said.
     Almost 125 years on, how's that coming?
     "The second step is to create a plan to take this a few steps forward to the next level," he said. "It's going to take a long time and going to take a lot of effort."
     Religion, to me, is not the solution to violence but an expression of the hostility people feel toward one another—conjuring a deity to put His divine thumbprint on your biases. Sure, you can pry religion away from that, just as you can use handguns as paperweights. But it's using an elaborate device to attempt something very simple.
     Before I let him go, I had to ask: You were an angry teen when you lived with Gandhi. Your grandfather was a famous pacifist. He obviously didn't spank you, right? How were you disciplined when you misbehaved?
     Gandhi laughed.
     "In our family, there was no punishment," he said. "Penance. We would fast for a day or two. We were never punished."

GTFO

     I can't imagine hating someone so much that I'd advertise it on the bumper of my car.
     Sadly, I didn't have to imagine it. All I had to do was walk by. There's a lot of that in contemporary American life: grotesqueries that grab you by the sleeve as you go about your business, or try to, and snarl out a low, wet, mean "Hi!"
     Thanks pal, thanks for sharing your cramped little world with me. Proud, are you? 
      The car was sitting in the parking lot of a moderately upscale restaurant in Northbrook where my wife and I went for lunch. So its owner isn't suffering so much he couldn't pop twenty bucks for lunch. I noticed the bumper sticker walking back to our car. Here, I'll blow it up for you. 
     If the acronym's meaning doesn't immediately leap out at you, don't feel bad. It eluded Edie too; I take that as a sign of purity of spirit. When you are immersed in this stuff, as I am, a certain sixth sense emerges.
      As a clue, notice the "O" contains the sunrise symbol used in Barack Obama's campaigns.
      Another hint. On the left bumper of the car, almost unnecessarily, is a yellow sticker, a version of the Revolutionary War "Don't Tread on Me" flag that Tea Partiers have embraced, representing their delusion that they are fighting for freedom, and not fighting against the freedoms of their fellow Americans and against their own country's success as a whole. Trying to hold back changes which are going to steamroll them, the way way the ignorant and the fearful and the prejudiced are always steamrolled by history, sooner or later.
      I've obscured the license plate, not because I worry someone would use it to track the car owner down and harass him—you just know it's a man—but, well, as as kindness. I don't anticipate the driver of the Durango will ever see this, but you never know, and I wouldn't want him to be made afraid. Or rather, more afraid. These people live on fear, clearly, and if real threats don't present themselves, they make them up. They need to justify their anger, to create villains, the way a slasher movie needs to establish the evil of its maniac before he can be subjected to the cruelties the audience is eager to enjoy.
     Fear and malice are the driving factors in their lives, and I don't want to add to it, because I'm a nice guy, and don't want to be like them. "When battling monsters," as my pal Nietschze said, "make sure that you do not in the process become a monster."
     Oh, GTFO stands for, "Get the Fuck Out." 
     Because Jan. 20, 2017, can't come around quick enough for these people. They have to cheer it along, to yearn for it, to celebrate and anticipate it. Because they have suffered ... um, oh let's come out and say it ... seeing a black man in the White House. That has to be reason because there's no possible explanation otherwise. Really, what has Barack Obama done to these folks that they would hate him so? What is the horror they're reacting to? Certainly not gun control. Or immigration reform. Just the contrary. Obama stepped up deportations, dramatically, trying to please those who would never be pleased (I assume; it certainly wasn't the right thing to do). The Affordable Care Act? It's affecting five percent of the country. Is that why there is a GTFO page online counting down the seconds? An entire line of GTFO products, bumper stickers and t-shirts and such? On a page offering t-shirts, I noticed this particular revealing design: "HOPE HE FAILS." 
    That's like the joke about the man drilling a hole under his seat in the row boat. I guess they don't realize that the president failing means the country failing, and them too. Which shows the difference between Obama scorn and Bush scorn, which Obama haters immediately bring up when attention is directed to their overarching hatred, as if Bush haters were suddenly their moral compass, as if the two were comparable, and they're not. This t-shirt illustrates why. People hated Bush because he was failing; people hate Obama so want him to fail. That might be a subtle difference to some, but to me seems clear and significant.
     For six years, the Republican right has hurt the country, and themselves with their insane rear guard action against anything Barack Obama has done. Our nation is frozen, largely. We can't do what we need to do, what the rest of the world has done long ago. In the next two years we'll no doubt see more of that, emboldened by their electoral win earlier this month. 
     Me, when it comes to Obama, I vacillate. Part of the time I want to fault him for not pushing harder, for not standing up more for his ideals more, whether by closing Guantanamo Bay, coming out earlier for gay marriage, trying harder for immigration reform, crafting a more comprehensive national health care laws.
    That view is based on his promises and his potential.
     But he is nothing if not a politician, and given the roadblocks he's run into, you can't fault him for not sprinting faster into the brick wall.
     When you hold his accomplishments up to the doorjamb-gnawing vehemence of his enemies, it's amazing he's done anything at all, from the Affordable Health Care Act, to this week's agreement with the Chinese to establish curbs on greenhouse emissions. Lack of participation of the Chinese always made international agreements trying to stem global warming somewhat pointless, as the Republicans liked to crow. Bringing them on board is hugely important in mitigating the disaster we can no longer avoid.
     Of course the Republicans, who don't recognize global warming as a real, man-made phenomenon, will find a reason to hoot him down on this too—they can't claim it doesn't go far enough, since they don't recognize the problem is within our control to begin with. Maybe they'll claim he's a traitor, for working out a secret deal with the Chinese. As with "amnesty," the actual situation doesn't really matter, they just need to find the right negative term they latch onto. Maybe they'll call it "accommodation." 
     And no, I did not key the car with the GTFO bumper sticker. Though the thought did cross my mind. When battling monsters....
       

I got plenty o' somethin'—opera tickets to give away!

With Adina Aaron, the latter half of Lyric's "Porgy and Bess"

     Every day, almost every newspaper in America runs a column devoted to lies intended to encourage the gullible to continue misunderstanding the world.  
     The Sun-Times used to run two.
     That it’s called “Daily Horoscopes” and that we’ve always run them must dilute the foolishness considerably, because in all the years I’ve worked here, readers have complained about the most head-scratchingly obscure elements of the paper, but nobody has ever demanded to know why we dabble in astrology, at least not to me. I don’t read them, though I often hold them up as a metaphor to those aghast at this or that feature found in the paper. “Here’s a flash,” I say. “It’s not for you. Not everything is for you.” The idea of there being other people, who appreciate other things, is one of the more thorny concepts to grasp, and running a horoscope helps drive that truth home.  A newspaper contains a universe, or should, and people discover in it what they may.
     Sure, the hoofbeats of change—or, if you prefer, doom—thunder louder day by day. The Internet is universe aplenty for most. But we’re still here, still twinkling in your morning sky as mightily as we can, and I like to think we’ll always fill a role, digging up news and curating the wordstorm online.
     Which is a long run-up to explaining why I’m extra pleased to announce the 7th annual Sun-Times Goes to the Lyric Contest. Readers started asking about it last week, when I dropped in on a rehearsal of “Porgy and Bess,” which 100 readers will attend Dec. 8. The choice is ideal. Not only a truly great American opera, with soaring music and powerful voices. But it’s what got me into this whole opera business. I wrote a column about race and “Porgy,” an editor suggested this contest, and away we went.
     I didn’t give the details last week for the same reason I always drag my feet with this: we were still figuring them out. But now we have, and it’s bigger than ever. Not only are we giving away 50 pairs of great seats to the Lyric opera. There are also prizes—stays at a hotel, gifts. And a party beforehand, which we did one year and was a lot of fun. Find details at www.suntimes.com/todayspaper.

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"I will write to you forever" — One World War I soldier's letters home

   

     In your letter you say, “What is love?” Surely a girl of 19 years ought to know what the word “love” means, if not, I do not think I could explain it to you.

     

     Tuesday is Veterans Day, when we honor the soldiers, sailors, Marines and other military men and women who serve and have served our country. The date, Nov. 11, was originally Armistice Day, the anniversary in 1918 of the end of World War I, so it is particularly apt to remember the two million Americans who fought in that war.

     What I mean when I say I love you is that I think more of you than of anybody else. You are the one that I would do anything for. You are one that I can trust and one who I can tell my troubles to.

     Recalling such an enormous group is impossible. It’s hard enough to remember just one person, taken at random, such as Pvt. Gail O. Woodman, who grew up in Evergreen Park and volunteered for the Army in 1917, following his older brother Roy. We can hear his voice today only because he wrote letters to a certain special young woman who, well, let him explain it.

     You are the one with whom I love to spend my idle hours with. You have a lovable disposition, you have winning ways, a great entertainer. With you nobody can feel lonely, and for this reason I have learned to love you.

     Gail Woodman — Gail was a man’s name 100 years ago — had met a teenager named Lucile Nelson, who lived at 3813 W. 83rd Place, in the Ashburn neighborhood.

     I have learned to love you so that now I want you for my own. You say you think you will always like me. Why can’t you always love me, dear?

     Four hours hadn’t passed after he left Chicago before Gail started to write his first postcard to her; his troop train hadn’t reached Bloomington, Indiana, yet.

     Train rocks so I can hardly write. Letter will follow.

     And so they did. Like every soldier, he complained about the food; the train trip was three days of beans, corned beef, tomatoes, bread, jam and coffee. . . . Texas is several month of sandstorms, scorpions and constructing the camp. Gail goes into detail discussing their mutual acquaintances while constantly pitching woo.

     If letter writing will hold us together as fast friends, believe me, dearie, I will write to you forever....

     The soldiers drill, train, dig trenches, put on gas masks, then are sent into buildings filled first with tear gas, then deadly chlorine gas.

     While we were in there they had us let a little gas into the mask and then had us smell it just to see what it is like. Do not think I would care for very much of it.

     The soldiers are showered with packages from home, with fruit cakes and hand-knit sweaters and chewing gum, all described in great detail and appreciated. Among the gifts is, ominously, a “trench mirror,” a tool to allow crouching soldiers peer above the lip of a trench, reducing the risk of getting shot. Gail gets a wristwatch; up to World War I men used pocket watches, but it is difficult to dig into your vest while face down in a trench. He worries about being thought of as a dandy.

     I belong to the “Wrist watch bunch” now. ... I am a regular ‘sissy’ now, don’t you think so, Lou?

     She is “Lou” and “girl” and “girlie” “sweetie” and “dear” and “dearie” and even “sweetie-dearie.”Details of their pre-war courtship come out in fond remembrances in his letters — ice skating, a dance at Carson, Pirie Scott, along with various private moments that are not specified, but obviously made an impression.

     Only wish I could be there to keep you warm ... Could only do it in dark places or when nobody is around, as in the hall or on the back swing, (not saying anything about the sofa). Sure do miss our good old Sunday nights, dear, and can hardly wait until we land in Chicago again so I can see my little girl again.

     Not to give the wrong impression. Gail has never had a drink and isn’t about to start. He sends $15 of his $36-a-month pay home to his parents. At Thanksgiving, 

     Lucile asks him what he is most thankful for.That is very easily done and in a few words. The thing I am thankful for most is that I know the Lord Jesus and that during the short time that I have been serving in the Army I have met others who know him also. It was my great desire, when I made up my mind to enlist, that I get with a company of men who were Christians.

     Well, not entirely Christians. There is a Jewish corporal, and as he passes with his men Gail sneers, “Here comes the rabbi squad” — too loudly; he is overheard, and nearly ends up in the brig. But he learns his lesson.

     After this I will be a little more careful what I say. I didn’t think he would hear, otherwise I would never have said it.

     Lucile, for her part, goes to Billy Sunday revival meetings, when they aren’t too crowded to get in. None of her letters survive: Lucile obviously is worried about others reading them, and several times Gail assures her he is promptly burning them, both for privacy, and to not have to “excess baggage to carry around.” He expects to be on the move soon.

     I enlisted to go to France and will feel disappointed if I don’t get to go.

     Besides wristwatches, Gail talks about news of the day, admires the “pluck” of a 14-year-old Chicago boy who managed to enlist. He refers to automobiles as “machines,” and remarks on another modern change brought about by the war.

     How do you like the idea of setting the clock ahead 1 hour? It will probably be alright when we get used to it.

     For sweethearts, they are surprisingly frank about seeing other people; he visits girls he’s set up with, she goes out on the town.

     Do not mind at all if you have some of the boys take you home, as you are capable of picking out someone who you will be safe with. I do not expect you to be tied down at all and whenever you get the chance to go out go ahead and have a good time....Don’t worry about being wicked, dear, as I don’t think it is a sin to dance, that is, the way we dance. There is a thing of carrying it too far but I know that you wouldn’t do that. Some people think that when a person dances that there isn’t any good in them. But we know different, don’t we dearie?

     Which raises the question for Lucile: If the girls Gail is seeing are only friends, then what is she?

     In your letter, Lou, you mentioned that I said, “I only went out with girls thru an introduction of a friend and that they were only friends of mine,” then you added, “Isn’t that all I am, Gail?” Can’t we be more than friends, Lucile? Why can’t we be sweethearts?

     Whether she intended to provoke this reaction is uncertain, but Gail takes the hint.

     Please accept this as a proposal, Lucile, for when I come back I would like to have you become my wife. Do not think that I intend to get married as soon as I get back, dear, but my love for you is so great that I just want to know where I stand. Please let me know as soon as possible, dear. Every thing will be held a secret even if you do accept, dear, which I sincerely hope you do.

     Gail is good to his word: However she replied to his proposal, he doesn’t refer to it, even in his letters to her. He finally get his furlough in May and comes home to Chicago. The letters stop during that period, but family legend has it that Lucile accepted his proposal. They took a photograph together in Evergreen Park that certainly looks like an engagement photo.When he returns to Texas, his company is packing up for France. His brother Roy has died — concentrating soldiers stoked the flu that would kill millions. Gail is soon in New York City, which seems to overwhelm his descriptive powers.

     New York is quite a place. All the railroads leading into N.Y. are electrified. The main reason for this is because they enter N.Y. thru the subway. The subway is quite a place.But troops only pause there, then load onto ships for the eight-day voyage to France. Have arrived safe and sound and I am feeling fine.  When I was in Chicago the first part of this month I didn’t think I would be so far away from you by the end of the month. France certainly is a beautiful place. The trees are full of leaves and the grass is very green .... This place is so old fashioned that it reminds me of the olden days. There is nothing that is up to date. They all have these old stone wells and you have to draw the water in a bucket.

     He mentions his brother Roy in passing on Decoration Day, the precursor to Memorial Day, when families visited the graves of fallen soldiers.

     Thought of you and the folks all day Decoration Day. Wondering what you were doing. I suppose the folks went out to Mt. Greenwood to see Roy’s grave. I was riding the old box car that day. Well, sweetheart, I must close now.

     After eight months of cleaning rifles, building barracks and riding trains and a ship, they find themselves at the war.

     Where we are at now we are about 10 miles from the front line. ... we can hear the reports of the cannons very plainly and at night we can see the flashes in the sky. Sunday afternoon we went into some trenches about 6 miles from the front, and stayed there for 24 hours. There were several big artillery guns stationed near these trenches and they sure did make some noise every time they went off. It was very interesting to see our airoplanes flying over the Germans and drawing fire from their guns. You could see the shells exploding all around them but none of them seemed to hit.

      Perhaps the most surprising thing about Gail Woodman’s letters are their upbeat tone. Later, members of his unit would write gut-churning accounts of a muddy, horrifying hell with bodies blown apart and rats gorging on corpses, none of which he tells his fiancee.

     O, Yes! I almost forgot to tell you. Since I have been sleeping in the dugouts, which is about the safest place to sleep when a person is in the trench, I accumulated a number of very close friends. Friends that stick closer than a brother, better known as the “cooties.” Believe me they are hard creatures to get rid of, too. I managed to get rid of them a couple of times but on my next trip to the trenches I got them again.Part of that might be concern for the censors, which stamp each letter.I understand that one of my letters to Geo. was cut up quite a bit by the censor. I am afraid I have been telling too much. If I don’t watch out my letter will be something like a certain fellow who wrote a letter to his mother and after the censors got thru with it all that was left of the letter was, “Dear Mother, “ and “Your loving son, John.”  Down below the censor wrote “Your son is well and happy but he is too darned newsy.” This will be the case if I am not careful.

     That was mid-August. On Sept. 5 he writes in a noticeably shaky hand. Compare what he is telling her with the matter-of-fact way he tells it.

     My dearest Girl,You have probably heard, thru my folks, that I have been injured. But there is no course for worry as I am getting along fine. I will soon be going to Blighty (England) as they call it over here, for a rest. As to my wounds, I have lost my right eye, a piece of shrapnel going right thru it. I also have several small wounds on my neck and one on my left chest. These do not amount to much. ... I am in a British hospital but American doctors and nurses have charge of it. I happen to be the only American in this ward, the rest being English, Canadians and Australians. I am getting the best of care here. The doctor said this morning he was well pleased in the way I was coming along. Now, dear, I don’t want you to worry as really I am getting along fine. Hope you are well.

     The rest of the letters are sharing the sights of London.

     London is quite a city. They seem to do everything just opposite to the way things are done in Chicago. The sidewalks are very narrow for a city like London and the buildings are not more than 7 or 8 stories high. They have very few high buildings like they do in Chicago and the buildings look to be very old. The street cars, autos, and wagons all move down the left side of the street instead of the right as done in America. It is very interesting to walk down the streets of a foreign city. There are so many things that interest you that you do not see in American cities. Most of my wounds have healed up now. I have just one other dressing besides my eye and that wound is just about well. How are you feeling now? Well, I hope.

     You would think, reading his letters, that he’s spending his days as a tourist. He isn’t.

     Nov. 6, 1918

     My dearest Girl,

    It has been some time since I have written to you but that is thru no fault of mine. Last week Tuesday I had that piece of shrapnel removed from my head and I have been in bed ever since, to-day being my first day up. The piece they took out was about ½ inch square and it had a few ragged edges. I think I will feel better now that it is out. ... Last Friday they moved me from Ward 9 over to Ward 28. They were going to make 9 a convalescent ward but last night they filled it up with bed patients again. They are most all bed patients in this ward. Must close now. I hope you are well and happy, dear. I am feeling fine. My love to your mother and lots to yourself.

     Your loving sojer boy, Gail

      On the envelope, Lucile wrote: I received this letter on November 30, 1918 which was the last letter from Gail as he died in a London hospital on Dec. 3rd, 1918.The letters sat in a shoebox for 70 years. Lucile Nelson married three times and had two children, nine grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren. 

     When she died in 1989, her granddaughter, Kathleen Loftus, a Columbia College lecturer, found them among her possessions. Her self-published collection of the letters can be purchased for $10 at lulu.com

Who will save Chicago from George Lucas' Space Mountain?

     If cutting-edge architecture were pleasing to the masses of ordinary folk, then it wouldn’t be cutting edge, would it?

     So of course, being a regular Joe, my immediate, visceral reaction to Chinese architect Ma Yansong’s design for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, planned for the lakefront, was to sigh, then shake my head in bewildered sorrow, then jump onto Twitter to lay claim to what I hope will be its derisive nickname attached to it in the same way that Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” is affectionately referred to only as “The Bean.”

     “I’m not in love with George Lucas’ Space Mountain design,” I tweeted. “It looks like landscape of the planet the UFO landing on Soldier Field comes from.”

     A little awkward, that last sentence. But Twitter’s 140-character limit can throw you off your stride.

     “Space Mountain,” of course, is the cheezy roller coaster at Disney World.

     I am not an architecture critic, so I figured it is a done deal if they’re releasing the sketches, and understood that, not being an expert, the wonders of Yansong’s design were perhaps beyond my ken.

     So I was gratified to see that the Tribune’s Blair Kamin, who is an architecture critic, and a good one, gave both barrels to the Lost Alp last week, calling the “widespread public revulsion” toward the design understandable because “this cartoonish mountain of a building would be glaringly out of place” on Chicago’s lakefront. Amen.

     If you want to see where a building like this belongs, look at the Denver International Airport, a series of peaks not unlike a CGI droid army of the ski slope that George Lucas plans to build downtown. The style was sorta hip 20 years ago, but even located in the middle of a Rocky Mountain nowhere, it’s hard to view it kindly. I’ve been through it many times, and my primary thought is: I bet they saved a bundle, putting up a tent, as opposed to constructing an actual roof.

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Lucas museum

     If cutting edge architecture were pleasing to the masses of ordinary folk, then it wouldn’t be cutting edge, would it?
     So of course, being a regular Joe, my immediate, visceral reaction to Chinese architect Ma Yansong’s design for the  Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, planned for the lakefront, was to sigh, then shake my head in bewildered sorrow, then jump onto Twitter to lay claim to what I hope will be its derisive nickname attached to it in the same way that Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” is affectionately referred to only as “The Bean.”
     “I’m not in love with George Lucas’ Space Mountain design,” I tweeted. “It looks like landscape of the planet the UFO landing on Soldier Field comes from.”
     A little awkward, that last sentence. But Twitter’s 140-character limit can through you off your stride.
     “Space Mountain,” of course, is the cheezy roller coaster at Disney World.
     I am not an architecture critic, so figured it is a done deal, if they’re releasing the sketches, and understood that, not being an expert, the wonders of Yansong’s design were perhaps beyond my ken.

      So I was gratified to see that the Tribune’s Blair Kamin, who is an architecture critic, and a good one, gave both barrels to the Lost Alp last week, calling the “widespread public revulsion” toward the design understandable because “this cartoonish mountain of a building would be glaringly out of place” on Chicago’s lakefront. Amen.
     If you want to see where a building like this belongs, look at the Denver International Airport, a series of peaks not unlike a CGI droid army of the ski slope that George Lucas plans to build downtown.  The style was sorta hip 20 years ago, but even located in the middle of a Rocky Mountain nowhere it’s hard to view it kindly. I’ve been through it many time, and my primary thought is: I bet they saved a bundle, putting up a tent, as opposed to constructing an actual roof.
     Contemporary architecture can be aesthetic. Look at Jeanne Gang’s sinuous Aqua Tower. Everyone who lays eyes on it knew immediately it was something different, creative, interesting, beautiful. Even Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion bandshell; it might have been wildly out of place, a peeled back tatter of stainless steel permanently flapping in the wind, but it had its own internal energy and, more so, is obviously a Gehry, which allowed us to accept something that otherwise would be mocked, the way a metal baboon designed by Pablo Picasso was given a place of honor in the heart of our city, while an identical baboon designed by Pico Pablono would have been given the bum’s rush.  Maybe someday having a Ma Yansong will mean something; but that day is not now. It’s just a white tent with a halo, which looks like an artificial snow cap peak sporting a lenticular cloud.
     How to react? Surrender? You can’t win every time. Even a city as  noted as Chicago has its share of famous duds. I can’t pass by the salmon and blue monstrosity of the Thompson Center and not comfort myself by imagining Helmut Jahn tarred and feathered and being rolled down State Street in a tumbrel, with mobs lining the streets, shaking pitchforks as he heads to the Daley Center for his show trial, punishment for the aesthetic sins his building imposed.
      Or fight?  The Friends of the Parks, clinging to the idea that we don’t live in a city where the mayor can do anything he wants, so are pushing the antique viewpoint that building anything on our forever free and clear lakefront is against the law. And Rahm himself was cool to this mountainous mass, leading us to hope that this was just a sketch tossed off on a the napkin, with the actual design of the real building to come later.
     Not that anyone’s looking to newspaper columnists for ideas, but given that this whole project is honoring a Saturday afternoon movie cliffhanger space opera —Buck Rogers on steroids—the problem is they’re suddenly putting on modern airs. Why not build something based on Queen Amidala’s Thneed Royal Palace on Naboo, all domes and minarets and Iberian excess? It would fit right in with the Field Museum and  the other various Edwardian and Deco relics scattered around the museum campus. And the people who actually go to this thing will have their beloved movie world spread out in front of them, which I thought is the whole point of this; I mean, it isn’t really being built so that the public can view Norman Rockwell paintings without having to travel to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, is it?
If we are stuck with it, we’ll just have to look on the bright side. Suddenly the addition dropped on top of Soldier Field isn’t quite so god awful ugly, by comparison, is it?