The Romans managed it

     That was fast.
     It's been, what, a month since the bright red "Loop Link" lanes opened on Madison and Washington, special bus-only routes designed to more than double the speeds that Chicago Transit Authority buses transverse the Loop, from an average of 3 mph, which is slower than briskly walking,  to a giddy 7.5.

     But just look at at them. A month of being pounded by traffic and what was described as "red pavement" in the city's grandiose plans of last year has revealed itself in the harsh light of January to be more like red tar paper, and is already coming up in big chunks. You can't very well expect drivers to avoid the red lanes if the "BUS ONLY" designation has peeled up and blown away. 
    Already plagued by delays over the past six months and greeted with a chorus of complaints from drivers who suddenly find Loop streets a lot narrower, the $32 million project might not have increased bus speeds, but it's given the downtown a shabby, am-in-Detroit-or-what? feel. 
      If this were in the newspaper, I'd feel obligated to call the city department of transportation  four or five times to squeeze out whatever half-hearted and feeble explanation they'd offer to illuminate What Went Wrong, and what Might Happen Next and why pave-the-road-so-it-doesn't-come-up-immediately technology, which was mastered in Roman times, seems to have eluded the City of Chicago, the City That Works Except When It Doesn't. But if I hear from the city, I'll rush to append it below.  
     In the meantime, the in-depth investigative work that led to these photos delayed my walk to the train a full 10 or 20 seconds one day last week. Additional investigation, which entailed walking down Washington Street on my way into work Thursday morning, showed that the red bus lane there is fine, so perhaps this is a localized screw-up limited to Madison Street's unique ecology, whatever that might be. Perhaps you, in your leisurely strolling, can find further examples of this latest embarrassment. Still, I suppose we should count our blessings, and not complain too much about a screw-up like this. At least no one was killed.

      

Abner Mikva laughs at 90

     Abner Mikva turns 90 Thursday. To mark the milestone I took the revered Chicago icon, who made his mark on all three branches of government—former congressman, retired federal judge and White House counsel—to lunch last week.
     How does it feel to be 90?
     "It's going to be kind of a shock," he said, using the future tense with a lawyerly precision. "I keep thinking of all the good reasons why I should be happy about it... I've already given up all the things I really enjoy: golf, tennis, sex, poker. There's nothing left to give up in the 90s."
     I get the golf, tennis and sex part. "But why poker?"
     "I have macular degeneration," he said. "I can't see the cards. I love the game."
      Mikva used to fly in just for the Washington Post's poker game. He said his favorite Washington figure to work with was Bill Clinton.

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"What matters infamy if the cash be kept?"

     I had lunch with former congressman, former federal judge, former White House counsel, current Chicago icon Abner Mikva last week—my Wednesday column will be about our conversation. He mentioned a column I wrote about him 10 years ago. I couldn't find it, but I found this, from the long-ago era when Rod Blagojevich was our governor, and it was so much fun I thought you might enjoy.
     This was back when I had a full page, with a brief "Opening shot," several small segments, and a joke at the end.

OPENING SHOT
     Obscurity pressed hard upon Juvenal, the Roman satirist who spent
his career crouched miserably in the antechambers of rich patrons, waiting for a half-gnawed chicken leg to be tossed his way. 
     That's why his satires remain so fresh today — you see this poor mope, thwarted at every turn, overlooked, underfed, trying to make his way through the crowded Roman streets, enviously eyeing the rich in their curtained sedan chairs, not noticing the burly centurion about to plant a hobnail boot on his toe. 
     So it would do the old Roman's heart good, I believe, to know that in 2008, in a nation he never heard of in a world he could not imagine, one of his pithier lines spontaneously popped into the head of a Chicagoan when he heard that his old boss, David Radler, had been released from a Canadian prison after less than a year in jail. 
     "What matters infamy if the cash be kept?" I thought, quoting Juvenal, figuring that, for the money Radler got from his crimes, minus penalties and legal fees, I'd gladly make birdhouses in the federal penitentiary for a year, and so would you. 

IS IT SHOWING OFF OR SHARING? 
     Am I bragging by mentioning a classical writer? Maybe so. But why is it viewed that way? Nobody says, "How can you guys pay attention to these football games, week after week, month after month, year after year. It's the same thing happening over and over. Doesn't it get boring? Why insist on talking about it?" 
     No, I accept that football is a passion that many love, one that adds richness and texture to their lives. Who am I to judge their fancies? Yet do they return the favor? Nooooooo. I was listening to the radio the other day — WGN — and this jamoke starts mocking people who talk about reading War and Peace. "Oh, I'm reading War and Peace," he gushes, in a smug, Homer-Simpson-imitating-a-fairy voice, as if the only reason to read War and Peace is to impress strangers. 
     I was truly offended, and I don't offend easily, and for the very reason most people get offended — because my ox was gored. I am currently reading War and Peace, out loud to my older son, and we're both loving it, not because it gives us something to brag about, but because it's great. When Tolstoy describes a horse, it's like an actual horse canters into the room, twitching and snorting. When Natasha jumps into her mother's bed to tell the old countess about Prince Andrei, it could be any 16-year-old girl gushing about her dreamboat.
     It's real. I know the common wisdom is that classics are these horrendous blocks of stone written by dead white males and forced upon the unwilling through some malign conspiracy. And I can see how people feel that way. Classics have their drawbacks. War and Peace is 1,200 pages long, and every character has four names. It gets confusing. I'm sure climbing Mt. Everest has drawbacks, too. But must I suppress enthusiasm, keep quiet, just because you can't imagine any reason to read it other than braggadocio? Every Monday we all have to hear about what the flippin' Bears did, yet let slip something about a book you love and you're a bigmouth blowhard preening your feathers. It's not fair. 

THE LEGAL DEPARTMENT 
     Usually experts have to be hunted, cornered, flushed out. So it was a pleasant turnabout to have one of the foremost legal authorities in Chicago phone me up out of the blue Tuesday. 
     "I want to talk about the attorney general's lawsuit," said Abner Mikva, former federal judge and adviser to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, referring to Lisa Madigan asking the Illinois Supreme Court to freeze embattled Gov. Rod Blagojevich's powers. "I know you're questioning it, but we thought long and hard and looked at it carefully before we filed." 
     The Illinois Constitution clearly sets out reasons a governor can be relieved of power: death, impeachment, failure to meet qualifications of office, "or other disability," the loophole that Mikva believes the court can use to spike Blagojevich. "It doesn't say 'mental' or 'physical'," said Mikva. "It would cover just about anything the court wants to prevent the governor from carrying out his duties." 
     Isn't that the problem? If this is a disability, it is a political disability, and is not the governorship by nature a position given to controversy? True, the governor is not typically caught scheming to sell a seat in the Senate, but the particulars are not the crucial aspect. Do we really want this precedent, that our courts can strip our governor of power for being accused of doing something bad? Could not an attorney general with fewer scruples than Madigan—who I believe is a straight arrow—abuse such a system? 
      "We thought it made more sense for the attorney general, the highest law enforcement official in the state, to make the case to the highest court in the state," said Mikva. "I don't think it is asking the court for an outlandish interference. It is the least invasive thing anyone could do. . . . Well, the least invasive thing he could do is resign." 
     Amen. Not that anyone expects Blagojevich to do the noble thing.
     "Had he been thinking about what's best for the state, he wouldn't have gotten himself into this mess in the first place," I said. 
     "Of course not," said Mikva. "But that's not his bag, I'm afraid."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE 
     I bumped into George Lemperis, owner of the Palace Grill, the famed diner and Blackhawks hangout on West Madison Street. He told me the following: Two inmates go through the lunch line with their tin trays, then find a spot in the crowded prison lunchroom.
     "This slop tastes awful," says the first, grimacing over his spoonful of gruel.
     "You think this is bad," says the second. "You should have tasted the food here when you were still governor."
               —Originallly published Dec. 17, 2008

"Possible criminals on the loose"

   

     Martin Luther King Day is upon us, again, and me without a card or anything...
     See, that's the problem. There's no upside for a white guy to talk about race. It's all risk and no reward. At worst, you end up making some inadvertent slip and lose your job.
     At best? You're still a white guy commenting on race. What could you say that would possibly matter? Why bother? "Sorry, not my table. Mary will be serving you today..."
     So ... nothing about race here. Just another regular, not-about-race column. The 1958 UN Law of the Sea conference; how many Chicagoans understand its implications....?
     Oh, hell, in a for a dime, in for dollar.
     I was walking my cute little dog through the lily-white suburb of Northbrook (black population, 0.6 percent) thinking about race Friday morning. What to say? There are more black people on the Metra Milwaukee North line in recent years? A good sign! There used to be none, and now there are some. And in the street -- a black kid on his bicycle. A black guy living on the next block. We've stopped together on the corner of Shermer and Walters, across from the train station, and I've looked at him, expectantly, but he never looks at me. So whatever hale, awkward white guy greeting I would blurt out just curdles in my mouth. "Welcome to suburbia, black person! Allow me to vent my innocent white guy goodwill upon you!"

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Johnny Chung scores again

    College pranks don't get much attention. Which is why it was surprising on Saturday to pick up the New York Times and not only see a story about a prank in the paper, but on the front page, under the headline, "Forget the Quarterback Sneak: A Deception Play for the Ages."
    In it, writer Bill Christine describes the 1941 Plainfield Teachers College prank, which he calls "one of the greatest hoaxes in sports history." It wasn't. It was a slight, charming deception that took place in the agate football scores at the back of the sports pages of a couple East Coast papers. Though Christine tells the story in great detail and at length—a full inside page—he never explains why he's telling us now about this 74 year old prank, and I can't explain why he would. It's a curious lapse. You can read it here. 
     Or you can refer to my 1992 book on college pranks, "If At All Possible, Involve a Cow," where I relate the incident with the concision it deserves:

     There is no rule that a college prank has to be pulled by a college student. Morris Newburger certainly wasn't in college: he was a stockbroker with the firm Newburger, Loeb & Company. He was also fascinated with the obscure schools that were listed in the college football roundup in the New York Herald Tribune.
     In the fall of 1941, he amused himself during America's last moment of global innocence by creating his own school—Plainfield Teachers College—and phoning the scores in every week to the Herald Tribune. 
     Newburger did his homework. When asked, he was ready with 22 names for the lineup roster—names of his friends, neighbors, business partners. There was also a certain Morris Newburger starting at right tackle.
     Every team should have a star, and Plainfield's was Johnny Chung, the half-Chinese, half-Hawaiian tailback known as the Celestial Comet. Under his leadership, Plainfield went 6-0, and seemed a shoe-in for the prestigious Blackboard Bowl.
     As can happen with these things, matters got a little out of control. Newburger found himself printing up letterheads for the Plainfield Teachers Athletic Association and took a post office box in Newark. Jerry Croyden, the imaginary director of sports information, sent out news releases and phoned tidbits to the papers. The Celestial Comet was tearing up the field.
     Sadly, the Plainfield Teachers never made it to the Blackboard Bowl. Enjoying himself immensely, Newburger bragged to one pal too many, and word leaked into journalism circles. With Time magazine preparing to expose the hoax in their next edition, Newburger rushed out a release having the Celestial Comet flunk his exams, and so many players became ineligible that the rest of the season was cancelled.
     The Herald Tribune finally smelled something fishy and checked with the Plainfield Chamber of Commerce, discovering the utter nonexistence of a Plainfield Teachers College about the same time the November 17, 1941 issue of Time hit the stands.

Rahm flaps his broken wings

      Remember Chris Christie? Big guy, governor of New Jersey, once thought he could be president? That was before the incident two years ago that knocked him from Republican party darling to mortally wounded also-ran: the closing of the George Washington Bridge as payback to the mayor of Fort Lee for not supporting him.
     Christie's defense was that his top aides did it, while he knew nothing.
     Which he seemed to think let him off the hook. But it didn't. What it did was create two equally unpalatable choices: either he really did know and is lying — the answer that makes the most sense, given his bullying, hands-on-everything personality.
     Or he didn't know, but placed his trust in chuckleheads who could engage in jaw-dropping political pranks, undermining the well-being of the public, right under Christie's nose while he remained in the dark.
     Really, which is worse?
     Now turn our gaze to Rahm Emanuel, our diminished mayor and the Laquan McDonald video. Having committed to his "I didn't know" defense, Emanuel is confronted with the paper trail of his top aides huddling constantly with officials from the law department and the police, discussing the McDonald case. For eight months. These same aides and officials also met with the mayor. But, Emanuel insists, they never brought up this matter. Because, like Christie, he seems to think ignorance is preferable to knowledge, and once you've lied about knowing, that might seem the only route left.
     What's Garrison Keillor's classic line about slipping in the shower? "It's isn't the fall that hurts you; but what you do trying not to fall."
     The not-knowing defense, when it comes to Rahm, is ludicrous, and he should abandon it while he can. Rahm is knowledge incarnate. He can spout forth the most stupefying gush of facts and figures and self-justifying statistics. To see him go mute and mournful and out-of-the-loop on this, holding up his broken-wing, all saucer-eyed and sad, like one of those waifs in an alley in a black velvet painting, well, it's an insult to us but, remember, (all together now) "Rahm thinks we're stupid."
     So where from here?
     Calling for him to quit is like begging God to send a fiery angel. Sure, it might help, but it ain't happening. If anything, this whole episode will prompt Emanuel, not to go away, but to stay even longer. My sense was he wasn't going to run for a third term before this happened, but between wanting to bully the City Council into approving his budget in October, and trying to maintain his ebbing sense of authority, he now say's he is going to, and he probably will. Because quitting = failure, and Rahm Emanuel can't fail, at least in his own estimation.
     Three years is a long time. Public attitudes can shift in a heartbeat. Let's say, as they fear, a cop gets shot while squinting at a suspect, asking himself whether that's a gun or a cellphone. Whoops, turns out to be a gun. Let's say by some miracle that gets on video. Suddenly the police view isn't quite so hypothetical.
     For the record, I still don't think Chuy Garcia should have won. The deer-in-the-headlights look that Rahm is slipping into now, in the depths of crisis, is how Garcia greets every morning on a good day. I hear every kind of credulous nonsense shouted from the streets. But I have yet to see a sign reading "WHERE IS BOB FIORETTI WHEN WE NEED HIM?!?"
     Rahm's an abrasive, charmless man. That said, the problems he faces are not ones solved easily. The schools can't get fixed because they're never fixed. The pension time bomb is protected by a force field of law that would thwart James Bond. And while it would have been great if, the moment Emanuel learned of the McDonald shooting he was on TV, denouncing it, how would that have played with the 11,000 members of the Chicago Police Department, who throw a sulk if treated with anything short of worship?
     Let's pretend for a moment that Rahm Emanuel is toast. So who's gonna run the city next? Nobody seems to be volunteering. Not yet anyway.

Lois Weisberg: "A flair for life"

Life magazine, Aug. 6, 1956

     

     I was just finishing up my column Thursday morning when my boss stuck his head in my office and told me that Lois Weisberg had died, and could I write her obit? I said sorry, I've got this column to finish, but knew that I was just ducking trying to grasp her long, complicated career. I had read Malcolm Gladwell's "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg" in the New Yorker years earlier and had no desire to compete with him. But 15 minutes later I finished up the column, guilt set in, and I went after him and told him I'd do it. It made for a full day, but Fran Spielman did yeoman's work helping out, which is why she has a joint byline. The column also ran, but I'll post that here tomorrow.

By Neil Steinberg and Fran Spielman

     She had the respect of both Harold Washington and Richard M. Daley and was friends with both Lenny Bruce and Maggie Daley. She was comfortable hitting up John D. MacArthur personally for money. She was lauded in the New Yorker and has a credit on the liner notes of Allen Ginsberg's 1959 recording of "Howl."
     Oh, and Lois Weisberg had a hand in creating many of the cultural institutions that make the city of Chicago such a vibrant place.
     Ms. Weisberg, 90, who died Wednesday at her home in Florida, was the tireless, idea-spouting, chain-smoking (before she gave it up) commissioner of cultural affairs through most of Daley's administration.
     From 1989 to 2011, she had a hand in almost everything that lent sparkle to the city, from helping create Millennium Park to re-opening Navy Pier as a tourist mecca to suggesting to Maggie Daley that the city turn a white elephant Loop embarrassment, the grassy field of Block 37, into Gallery 37, an artistic mecca for school kids. She turned the abandoned Chicago Public Library main building into the event-packed Chicago Cultural Center, made "Taste of Chicago" a success, and oversaw creation of the Blues Festival and the Gospel Festival.
     "Most of us make an effort to think outside the box now and then," said Kimberly Costello Keefe, who served under her in the Department of Cultural Affairs. "It was no effort at all for Lois, who never really saw or understood the box to begin with. Nothing was off limits, unthinkable, impossible and that’s why her legacy is so broad and diverse."
     In the mid-1970s, aghast at Chicago's neglected public parks, then "considered rubble-filled, dangerous political fiefdoms," Ms. Weisberg formed Friends of the Parks. She single-handedly saved the South Shore Line from Chicago to South Bend by pressuring Rep. Sidney Yates and organizing school trips to the Dunes to show the line's value.
     "Lois has this thing — whatever it is — that brings people together," wrote Malcolm Gladwell, in a worshipful profile, "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg," in the New Yorker in 1999, the year she brought an obscure Swiss event, "Cows on Parade" to Chicago.
     Not everything she touched worked, of course. The follow up to the cows, bringing ping-pong tables to city streets the next year, failed to come near its success. She was also behind the "complete chaos" of the Bears 1985 Super Bowl victory parade, though — Rahm Emanuel take note — she admitted she made a mistake, by locating the parade on LaSalle Street and preparing for 150,000 spectators. Half a million showed up.
     "I should have figured out what would happen.," she said.
     Bestowed with awards and tributes, she had the rare honor, in 2006, of being declared the first "Legendary Landmark" by the Landscape Preservation Council of Illinois.
     "Since she wasn't a building, they honored her body," Mary Cameron Fry wrote in the Sun-Times.
     Lois Porges was born on the West Side of Chicago, daughter of Mortimer and Jessie Porges. Her father was an assistant attorney general for Illinois, her mother was a housewife. She grew up in Austin and went to Austin High School. She took elocution lessons and at 16 was the only teen in a local theater group.
     "She was always, always interested in the theater, always," said her sister, June Rosner.
     Ms. Weisberg first attended University of Illinois, then transferred to Northwestern University, graduating in 1946. There she met Leonard Solomon, a pharmacy student, and they married shortly after graduation, making newspaper columnist Irv Kupcinet, who was married to Solomon's sister, Essee, her brother-in-law, and Kup offered entry into the world of Chicago celebrity and theater.
    She was doing radio plays with her childhood friend, Sondra Gair, and became interested in George Bernard Shaw. She then noticed his centennial, July 26, 1956, was nearing, and would be uncelebrated in Chicago. So she waylaid John D. MacArthur at the Pump Room and squeezed $10,000 from him, persuaded the city's adult education council to let her throw a Shaw birthday party for 800 at the Hotel Sherman, complete with Shavian vegetarian lunch. Norman Thomas and William Saroyan spoke, and the event drew notice in Life magazine.
     "That's how it started," she once said.
     Her home on Scott Street turned into a salon for writers and musicians and artists. Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane would show up. Her parties might have Dizzy Gillespie and Ralph Ellison. William Friedkin, who would go on to direct "The Exorcist" and "The French Connection" stopped by often. Arthur C. Clarke, whom she met at a science fiction convention, was in town once, and she paired him up with another writer who happened to be here, Isaac Asimov. In 1959, she sponsored beat poet Allen Ginsberg to visit the city, and recorded him reading "Howl" — "Lois Solomon" is credited on the album's liner notes. Off-color comic Lenny Bruce was a houseguest, to the consternation of her mother, who came to call.
     "Bruce had been in the shower and opened the door wearing only a towel," Ms. Weisberg later recalled.
     She and Solomon divorced, and in 1962 she married Bernard Weisberg, a well known civil liberties lawyer who became a federal magistrate.
     In 1975, Ms. Weisberg was director of development for Business and Professional People for the Public Interest. She read a magazine article about the decline of Chicago's park system and snapped into action, creating Friends of the Parks, leading a volunteer cleanup of Jackson Park.
     "People need the parks as much as they need bread," Ms. Weisberg said, when honored in 1995 for the group's creation. "They are probably the most important recreational part of life of any city."
     She was also executive director for the Chicago Council of Lawyers.
     She joined Mayor Harold Washington's staff in 1983 as executive director of special events, though one of her first events — Washington's birthday party at McCormick Place — did not go smoothly. Wheeling out a giant birthday cake, Ms. Weisberg realized they didn't have a knife to cut it. Grabbing a convenient hammer, she extended it, smiling, toward the mayor, and was wrestled away by his security detail, who had no idea who she was.
     She "figured out every detail" of his second inauguration in 1987, including handing out packets of seeds to honor Chicago's "city in a garden" slogan.
     "We want them to be a symbol of the birth of a new Chicago," she said at the time.
     In July, 1987 she quit, saying she was "completely drained after four years in a pressure cooker" and wanted to spend more time with her family. But in 1989 Daley appointed her head of his new Cultural Affairs Department.
     "What an odd pairing. They worked very fruitfully together for a very long time," said her son, Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of Slate. "Their partnership was a marriage of strange bedfellows. Daley saw the good she did for the city and realized those weren't results he could get any other way. She found him open in ways she didn't expect to her unconventional approach to government."
     In 1991, Ms. Weisberg oversaw the transition of the city's 1897 landmark central library on Michigan Avenue to the Chicago Cultural Center.
     "It must be a place where families and people of all ages can have the opportunity to partake in free cultural programs in the visual arts, dance, music and theater," she said.
     In 1999, her "Cows on Parade" brought an estimated $200 million in commerce to the city. She created local art fairs and street festivals, and brought public dancing to summer evenings.
     "If you're talking city arts festivals, exhibits, concerts, grass-roots arts funding, you're talking Lois Weisberg," M.W. Newman wrote in the Sun-Times in 1991 calling her "the den mother of the arts."
     In January, 2011, when Daley was merging the Department of Cultural Affairs with the Department of Special Events, Ms. Weisberg quit.
     "One of the main reasons I am leaving is that I am angry about the way the mayor has treated me," Weisberg told the Tribune. "Not to ask me about [the merger], not to get any input from me about something like this merger, and about privatizing the festivals, strikes me as just wrong."
     She had also been under pressure for her way of connecting people and making hires, which was not in keeping with Shakman restrictions.
     In addition to Jacob Weisberg, survivors include Joseph, her other son from her marriage to Bernard Weisberg, as well a daughter from her marriage to Leonard Solomon, Kiki Ellenby, eight grandchildren and three great grandchildren, as well as her sister, June Rosner. Her daughter Jerilyn Fyffe died in 2011.
     What was Lois Weisberg's secret that allowed her to live such a full life?
     "She just had a flair, a flair for life," said Rosner. "She always had these wonderful ideas."
     "She didn't understand the obstacles and difficulties," said Jacob Weisberg. " "She had a one of a kind talent for making things happen. She thought a good idea was a powerful force in the world."
     Funeral services will be Monday 1:30 p.m. at Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago.