John Glenn: astronaut, hero, guy who got Kennedy to put on a hat.

     John Glenn passed away Thursday. The astronaut and senator was a true American hero.  I had the honor of interviewing him once, and it says something about his regular guy demeanor—he was an Ohioan, after all—that he agreed to speak with me about an obscure episode in his life related to hats and John F. Kennedy. The story appears in a truly odd book, my history of the decline of men's headwear as told through the life of Kennedy, "Hatless Jack." 

     The hatters lobbied Kennedy, but they were too sophisticated to try to physically slap a hat on the president's head. Not all his guests were that savvy. The most routine White House ceremonies were a cause of concern for Kennedy.
     "Kennedy had a horror of hats," Sidey wrote. "He had an even greater horror of being forced to don the unorthodox headdresses of visiting delegations."
     Kennedy's military aide, Major general Chester Clifton, recalled a worried Kennedy taking him aside and seeking reassurance before the visit of a group of Native Americans in the Rose Garden.
     "They're not going to give me a bunch of feathers to wear, are they?" Kennedy asked.
     Whether Kennedy wore a proffered hat or not was definitely a function of who was making the attempt. While Kennedy did not want to be crowned by just anybody, if the situation was right, he would permit it to happen. The president had enormous respect for Colonel John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the earth. Kennedy had been worried about the flight, going so far as to invite Glenn to the White House beforehand to talk about safety. When Friendship 7 later made its three and a half revolutions around the earth, there was indeed great concern that the heat shield had come loose, which would have doomed Glenn to a fiery death upon reentry.
     But the shield held. Glenn survived his flight—for which he received an extra $245 in flight pay—to become the greatest American aviation hero since Charles Lindbergh. A relieved Kennedy hurried to Florida to congratulate Glenn in person and pin the Distinguished Service medal on him.
     Kennedy, Glenn, the astronaut's family, and various NASA officials then toured the space facility, in a hectic scene, a "crush of reporters, photographers, Secret Service men, spectators and employees."
     There was a small presentation at Launch Pad 14. Glenn produced a green hard hat that the base manager had given him. It was like those worn by the launch crew, except emblazoned "J.F. Kennedy, President, U.S.A." and "John Glenn, First Manned Orbital Flight, 2-20-62" (conveniently forgetting Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man—albeit a Russian—to orbit the earth) along with a painting of a globe surrounded by three orbits. He presented it to Kennedy.
    "This will make him an honorary member of the launch crew," said Glenn. Kennedy put the helmet on and then removed it. "Glad to have you aboard, sir," Glenn said.
     The most interesting aspect of this particular encounter is that it reminds us of the power of image to corrupt impressions of history. Even though Kennedy undoubtedly wore the helmet—there are photographs of him wearing it—by the time the episode reached one memoir, it had been massaged so as to fit Kennedy's reputation.
     "There was a bit of byplay as Glenn, knowing JFK's aversion to funny hats, tried and failed, as so many had failed before him, to put a hard hat on his head," wrote William Manchester in a book about his years with Kennedy.
     Glenn, incidentally, denies knowing about Kennedy's dislike of hats or trying to put one on him mischievously. "I wasn't aware of his aversion to hats or anything," he said. "I didn't know anything of it. I just put it on, thinking it was okay."
    Glenn said it was spontaneous act of his part.
    "We were out showing him the launch pad and on the pad out there normally everyone is required to wear a hard hat," Glenn said. So when we got out there, standing there, I just put it on him ... He wore it for a little while. he didn't take it off immediately."

"The mind may be at rest...."

    "What moves you if the senses do not spur? Light moves you."                                                                         —Dante, Purgatorio

    Driving south on 57, just before Champaign, I noticed the engine light was on. The engine light had never, to my memory, come on, not in the 11 years we've had the Honda Odyssey. I had driven about 150 miles and had another 100 miles to go. The last thing I wanted was to break down in Southern Illinois, land of pick-up trucks, both Chevy AND Ford.

"With this, my mind withdrew into itself, with what imagining might bring to it."

     I got off the highway at University Avenue. At a gas station, I plugged "What does the engine light on a Honda Odyssey mean?" into Google and found a bunch of articles damning the vagueness of the signal. It could mean anything from a faulty oxygen sensor to a balky catalytic converter to a loose gas cap. I got out and tightened the gas cap. The light stayed on. But none of the meanings seemed to be something serious enough to strand a person in downstate Illinois. That was reassuring.

     "Ye shall gather some useful fruit from our delaying here." 

     Still, better safe than sorry. I used my iPhone to locate the local Champaign Honda dealer and phoned their service department. The mechanic could, he said, run a diagnostic. It would cost $110 and take 90 minutes. That 90 minutes was the problem. I had a story to sniff out, and didn't want to take the time.
    "But it's not something pressing?" I said, half asking, half suggesting. "It can wait until I get back to Chicago. It'll last another couple hundred miles?"
     He said that yes, it could wait. "If the engine light isn't flashing, you're okay," he said. I was reassured—there was a level of warning more dire than this one—and decided I would continue on my way, and let the Odyssey fall into the strong arms of Muller Honda when I return.

    "Everyone apprehends dimly, and craves a good at which a mind maybe be at rest."  

    Tell it, my brother. I was listening to Heathcote Williams read Dante's "Purgatorio" -- Dante is always relevant. "Promise much, but deliver little," a sufferer tells Dante in "Inferno," summarizing the advice that landed him in Hell. (Maybe his timing was off; the same strategy landed Donald Trump in the White House).
     But I smiled slightly, hearing the faintest echo of my engine light saga in the Divine Comedy — Canto 17, for those keeping track. It made me wonder whether the relevance is there at all, or something that I layer over it, trying to justify the time spent listening.  Not that it's necessary. The words are enough. 
  
     

     
   

Pearl Harbor memory lingers, an echo of love and loss

    Stanley Swiontek played the clarinet, and it might have cost him his life.
     The Chicagoan was a cook on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor which, like many ships, had a band. On Dec. 6, 1941, there was a contest, and the Arizona band came in second, earning Swiontek the right to sleep in on Sunday morning.
     So when the Japanese surprise attack came, and a bomb hit the Arizona, sinking the battleship in nine minutes, Swiontek, instead of being at work and perhaps safe, was in his bunk, deep below decks.  

Rick Martinotti

     Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered. Five out of six sailors aboard the Arizona died that day. Swiontek’s family never learned what happened to their Stanley. His body was never recovered — it is still entombed with 947 shipmates aboard the sunken Arizona, now a national shrine.
      Franklin D. Roosevelt famously dubbed Dec. 7 "a day which will live in infamy." And it has. But 75 years is a long time. Even infamy fades. The remaining Pearl Harbor survivors — a few thousand — are in their 90s. The smallest child to hear the shock of that Sunday afternoon radio bulletin is at least 80 now.
     Which is not to say that subsequent generations are untouched. For the families of those affected, the attack and the 2,403 American lives it cost resonate still, a lingering echo of love and loss.
     Begin with parents like Swiontek's mother Victoria, a Polish immigrant, who saved every letter Stanley wrote home, in cursive.

To continue reading, click here.

Stuff I love: Red Wing boots

     Six inches of snow fell on Chicago Sunday, a record for Dec. 4. Much of it was still around Monday, slushy and wet, and I decided to break out my Red Wing Boots for the first time this season.     

     The boots helped. Not so much navigating downtown, which was fairly clear. But with the psychological boost a good pair of footwear can bring. Monday was also the day that the nascent Trump administration announced it is naming Dr. Ben Carson, he of the mumbled, almost gnostic idiocies, as head of the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs. Another grim milestone in the reckless administration of a reckless man loading up on idiots for our collective tumble over the cliff. 

     Or not. We've been in ominous times before and somehow struggled through, intact. The boots harkened back to another worrisome year, 2009, when the economy had cratered and the new president, a novice senator who talked a good game but had not yet proven himself, had yet to bring it back. I was expecting the paper to close at any moment, and the time seemed right for a sturdy pair of boots. I wrote about it, in a column that, in retrospect seems surprisingly candid, almost fragile. Anyway, now, at a similarly bleak — aw heck, at a whole lot bleaker — moment in our national saga, seems an apt time to revisit it. Back then my column was divided into sections, and I've left those section markers in, including the concluding joke. I figure, we could all use a joke about now.

OPENING SHOT

     "Why don't you wear jeans?" my wife suggested, as I stood puzzling in front of the open closet. "You're a writer, you can wear jeans. You look good in jeans."
     It was a few hours before I had to appear on a panel at the Printers Row Event Formerly Known As a Book Fair (I just can't call it a Lit Fest).
     Even I wasn't going to wear a business suit to an outdoor fair on a Saturday morning in June, but was thinking maybe khakis, a sports coat.
     But why not blue jeans? The world's falling apart anyway. And if my wife says it's OK, it's OK. I stood there pondering, which she must have taken as paralysis.
     "Why don't you wear your Red Wing boots?" she added, soothingly. "Then you'll be ready for anything."
     That shocked me. It's one thing, I thought, slowly reaching for the high black jump boots, to nurture an irrational private notion. It's something else entirely when your significant other catches your odd occult beliefs from you, and begins repeating them back as if they made sense.

'DOWN THE DARKENED HALL'

     A person should not let his actions be dictated by song lyrics.
     I know that. Songs are not speaking to you, directly. They are written by people you don't know, under vastly different circumstances from your own. They are made up, and not guides to behavior. I know that.
     And yet.
     Once, decades ago, I was driving alone down a deserted stretch of southwestern highway, when I saw a sign announcing Winslow, Ariz. -- I impulsively took the exit and soon found myself in the center of a small town where I parked and stood, briefly, on a lonely street corner. No girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford slowed down to take a look at me, as happens in the Eagles song.
     But had one wanted to, I was right there.
     And then. A few months ago, I drove to Rogan's Shoes in Buffalo Grove because the Web site for Red Wing Shoes says Rogan is a Red Wing dealer. I had decided to buy a pair of Red Wing boots because . . . God, this is embarrassing . . . because in the Tom Waits song "Ruby's Arms," he says, "All I need is my Red Wing boots, and my leather jacket."
     I had just bought a leather jacket — brown, simple, no buckles, something Woody Guthrie might wear — so the boots seemed the next logical step. Then I would have all I need. And with the coming economic apocalypse, one never knows when one might be, oh, part of a line of refugees walking west. A good pair of steel-toed boots might come in handy.
     Red Wing boots are made on the banks of the Red Wing River in Red Wing, Minn. Or so I assumed, figuring that would explain the $180-a-pair price tag, twice as much as boots made by slaves in China.
     At that price, it couldn't be an impulse buy. Not for me. I tried the boots on, wandered the store for 20 minutes. Then went home for a week and thought about it, then came back a second time, with my wife for moral support. She has none of the psycho-buying-stuff hang-ups that I do.
     "They fit? Buy 'em," she shrugged. So I did, thinking that between the boots, the leather jacket, and the bracing narrative of the Tom Waits song, now I was indeed ready for anything. Let the economy totter.
     It was in the parking lot, heading for the car, box of boots in hand, that I ran "Ruby's Arms" through my mind one more time for reassurance. "All I need is my railroad boots," he plainly sings, "and my leather jacket."
     "Railroad boots" -- not "Red Wing boots." What was I thinking? I stopped cold. I almost whipped around and hurried back into the store to return the boots. But what would I say? "These aren't the boots in the song"? Besides, I have a rule that I don't do that kind of thing anymore — I make decisions and stick with them, lest my life devolve into a nightmare of action, regret and retraction.
     Tell me this lyrics idiocy isn't a unique failing of my own. Please. There must be other people who do things because of songs. Who happen to be in Memphis and beeline — as I did — to Charles Vergo's alley restaurant, The Rendezvous, simply because John Hiatt sings: "At least we can get a decent meal, down at the Rendezvous" in "Memphis in the Meantime."
     Who finds satisfaction the way I did in realizing that Tom Waits does mention the boots in a different song, "Mr. Siegel" ("I shot the morning in the back, with my Red Wings on. . .")
     Frankly, I write the entire episode off to stress over the economy. I can't control what's happening in America. My pair of boots was made in the good old U.S. of A., though Red Wing informs me that about half of their footwear is now made in China. Nothing to be done about that. But you can make sure you have good boots. Maybe that'll help.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

      The little boy put on his own shoes for the first time and ran to show his mother.
     "Sweetie," she cooed. "That's wonderful. But you've got your shoes on the wrong feet."
     He looked down in confusion and horror, then up at his mother.
     "But mommy," he said, his lower lip starting to tremble. "These are the only feet I've got!"
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 8, 2009

Refute Trump's lies with force and alacrity

Samuel Johnson

     George Berkeley was an Irish cleric — the Bishop of Cloyne — and philosopher. His 1709 "An Essay toward a New Theory of Vision" promoted "immaterialism," the idea that physical objects do not actually exist but are merely perceived. The world isn't all houses and stones, just light and color.
     I mention this as part of my broad-minded attempt to give Donald Trump and his supporters the benefit of the doubt. The idea that there is no reality, no facts, that all is subjective perception was not invented by them, though they certainly have seized the Berkeley viewpoint in what is already being called our "post-fact world."
     Last week, Scottie Nell Hughes, a CNN contributor and Trump supporter, phoned a Washington, D.C., public radio station that was discussing Trump's baseless claim that millions of illegal votes were cast in the last election. Hughes argued that these deliberate fabrications were not "lies," but merely differing views. She said:
     “I hear half the media saying that these are lies, but on the other hand, there are many people that go, 'No, it’s true.' And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts, they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not truth. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts. "
     How to reply? I could point out that this is patently false and give an illustration: millions of children believe in Santa Claus, yet that does not will him into physical being.
     But Trumpian thinking — and remember, his logic is not about perceiving reality, but obscuring it — dismisses this as just another opinion, and one from the mainstream media at that. (His whole lying media schtick is not based on any media lies, but on a kill-the-messenger attempt to shut up those pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.)

    To continue reading, click here.

No Royko

     On Friday, Mark Konkol wrote a column about "Out of the Wreck I Rise," and on Saturday Scott Simon featured it on NPR, and suddenly the book rose to No. 36 among top sellers on Amazon. OMFG, as the kids say. I wanted to link here to Mark's column, and link to Scott's interview. I figured I should also write something, though what I ended up with is only tangentially connected with either of these pieces. What's the connection? I suppose it's that I know both guys, and that their drawing attention to my book and me trying as a matter of policy not to be a jerk to colleagues, or at least my struggling to restrain my jerkish tendencies, are not unconnected.

     Mike Royko hated younger columnists, because he viewed them as competition. Which was silly, because they certainly were not competition, given the singular place he occupied—and occupies still, almost two decades after his death—at the summit of Chicago journalism. 
     Among the many blessings in my life is the insight that you don't have to try to be Mike Royko—some guys never grasped that, and their misfortune is on the page. When readers, as they sometimes do, write to snidely inform me that I'm no Mike Royko, I surprise them, I imagine, by thanking them, and pointing out that, given Royko was a mean drunk whose son ended up robbing a bank, not being Rokyo isn't the stark fate they imagine, certainly not as rough as being him seemed to be.
     It has also made me reflexively nice to new writers and reporters, because I remember the disappointment I had the handful of times I actually interacted with Royko, how I would have given anything for a kind word, and never got anything close. Just the opposite. Once he threatened to break my legs. Not in a joshing way, but as in an I'm-the-guy-who'll-break-y0ur-legs way. A story for another day.
     Trying to avoid that, I say hello to young reporters, compliment them on their writing when possible. Their good work doesn't diminish me, it enhances my experience as a reader and makes the profession we're all in more valuable. As I once told my late pal Jeff Zaslow, success is not a pie—your getting a bigger slice doesn't make my slice smaller. I'm glad there are so many good columnists in Chicago. Over at the Tribune, Eric Zorn, always a thoughtful and engaging writer, has been on fire since the advent of Trump. Lately, in my column, I'm torn between the need to raise the alarm and the need to comfort the alarmed, and when I'm doing the latter, I feel less guilty knowing that Eric's concentrating his fire on the target undistracted. Rick Kogan is the city made human flesh and among my most reliable friends—and, I should point out, someone who was very good friend of, and a golfing partner with, Royko, a reminder that Royko could be very kind to people who weren't me and frantic little would-be parvenues like me. Others at the Trib: Mary Schmich is ruminative, Rex Huppke often manages that toughest of tasks, to be genuinely funny. 
     How could admitting that be anything but a sign of confidence? There are more. At the Sun-Times, I appreciate Mark Brown, Mary Mitchell, the obits of Maureen O'Donnell, the reviews of Richard Roeper, the celebrity insights of Bill Zwecker, Rick Telander in sports—I could go on and on, and hope my colleagues forgive me for not including them, but I have to think of the reader first, and lists tend to grow tiresome.
     I haven't even mentioned online. There are years when I turn my head and spit when speaking Robert Feder's name—he did once compare me to the lunatic Jay Mariotti, which is the height of unfairness—but he still owns the media beat, and if I walked past Tribune Tower and saw workmen tearing it down with crowbars I would hurry to Feder to find out What the Hell Just Happened. 
     Which leads to my former colleague, Mark Konkol, now at DNA Info, whom I remember back to when he was one of the youngsters on the staff at Red Streak, the free training wheels newspaper we rushed out, in a truly dramatic show of Front Page daring, to steal the thunder from the Tribune's new kiddie paper, Red Eye. Konkol had the fire—most people, even most reporters, just phone it in. You could just tell he wanted it, whatever it was. During the last mayoral election, he did a column—he was in Chuy Garcia's house, chatting with him, that I remember reading, and thinking, "Wow, that's how it's supposed to be done."
     Anyway, I haven't been able to hang with Mark as much as I'd like, since he's off scaling the heights of Hollywood, and several times I had to manfully suppress the urge to pick up the phone and snarl, "Where the fuck are you?" My patience was rewarded Friday, with Mark's spot-on column about my book, "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery," written with Sara Bader. I'll let you in on a secret. Sales are nice. But what an author really wants is for someone to Get It. And while the page 4 notice in the Sunday New York Times Book Review was nice, and the full page review in the Toronto Star was nice, those authors did not grasp the book in front of them. Especially the Star, whose review called the book "a pub crawl," which left me pounding the heel of my hand against my forehead.
    Mark got it. He really did. If you haven't seen his Friday column from DNA Info, here it is.  The only thing better than reading a really good column by a fellow columnist is reading a really good column by a fellow columnist about a book that you wrote and love. 

Fight Donald Trump with cheesecake

Proof that we not only talk the talk, we walk the walk: Eli's cheesecakes set out for Ross's high school graduation party.

    Howdy folks. Enjoying the blog? Good, good. Glad you like it. I certainly enjoy writing it.
    Although. One drawback of the quality journalism you've come to expect here is that people tend to start reading, immediately, just jump right on in, and then are carried away, rapt, into my column, and perhaps never notice the advertisement on the side.
    Can't blame them. There's only the one. But it is an important one.
    So I'd like to direct your attention to the left, to the new December ad by the blog's sponsor, Eli's Cheesecake. If you click on it, you'll be taken to the company site where you'll be able to order tasty, wholesome, nutritious Eli's cheesecake for yourself, your friends and your family.
    Why? Well, because it's delicious, for starters. But more than that. We live in perilous times. And as our nation deteriorates into a disordered, Manichean and uncivilized place, we are going to increasingly rely on the relief offered by basic creature comforts such as Eli's cheesecake. As difficult as it is to see Trump naming a Mardi Gras parade of fanatics, wash-outs and incompetents to his cabinet, as painful as it will be to see environmental regulations cast aside, Medicare gutted, and the civil liberties of Americans and hardworking immigrant residents ignored, the route ahead will be all the more challenging if there is nothing good in the house for dessert. The quality of our national discourse, our American pride and our cherished freedoms might slip, precipitously, but the quality of Eli's cheesecake? Never.
    So stock up on Eli's cheesecake now, before the break down of the government affects the package delivery system, or the electrical grid is impacted by a surge in terrorism or from fallout of whatever reckless war or unnecessary international crisis Trump blunders into by stunts such as talking to the Taiwanese president in contravention of 40 years of tradition. We might all be living on canned food and squirrels caught in snares in 2018. But right now you can survive on peppermint cheesecake — doesn't just the thought of that make the four-year infamy that our nation must endure just a little less of a doorjamb-gnawing flash of unspeakable woe?
    If not for yourself, think of your friends, perhaps in distant cities, still reeling at the stab to the soul that the past election represented, frightened folks whose bleak December days could be enlivened by a dark chocolate banana cheesecake from Eli's, or a salted caramel halavah cheesecake, or red velvet cheesecake.
    Wait. Back up. My God. Did I say salted caramel halavah cheesecake? I did. You've never had that in your life, have you? Admit it. You never even heard of it. But now that you have, you won't be able to get it out of your mind. Salted. Caramel. Halavah. Cheesecake.
    Though the enticing effect might be lessened among those who don't quite know what halavah is (fantastic candy made of ground sesame seeds adored by us swarthy Semitic tribes).  Just the thought of salted caramel halavah cheesecake is the spark relighting the beacon of hope that was recently extinguished by the political micturition of 60 million fellow citizens. America didn't reach this point by caving into tyrants, foreign OR domestic. We approach life with the same sense of possibility that lead us, in only 50 years, from the bland yellow disc of a Sara Lee cheesecake to the multi-cultural splendor and deliciousness of an Eli's Salted Caramel Halavah Cheesecake, which you can order right now by clicking here. Do it for yourself or, if not for yourself, for a friend or, if those two imposing beneficiaries don't shake open your wallet, do it for me. I write this stuff every day without asking you to do anything but read it and, now, to buy a cheesecake. For yourself. For a friend. Or hell, for me. Send me the Salted Caramel Halavah Cheesecake. 
    Because even if you can no longer rely on the president or the press, on Congress or the basic decency of your neighbors, this blog and Eli's cheesecake will never let you down. And that's something.