Snowman in August

     Art is the thing you go to see, that you seek out. 
     Last Thursday, that meant catching the Gauguin show at the Art Institute.  My wife hadn't seen it and though I had already, I accompanied her to see it again—Art is the thing you can see twice, another definition—I also had an agenda. 
      I wanted to see the snowman.
      I first heard of it a few days earlier. I was at a camp for kids with cancer at the Palmer House. The kids had just been to the Art Institute and seen the snowman. I've been to the Art Institute many, many times. I didn't remember a snowman. But obviously there was one now, and I wanted to see it.
    Why? Well, it was a snowman. At the Art Institute. In August. That is a certified, seal promise of whimsy, and the 2016 work of Swiss artists—natch!—Peter Fischli and David Weiss did not disappoint. A smiling, friendly snowman, in the classic three balled form, lacking the traditional carrot nose and charcoal eyes but radiating good will nevertheless. 
     He was outside, on the Bluhm Family Terrace—an apt touch—in his own little refrigerated aluminum vitrine. My son Kent pointed to the cord, visibly snaking away and plugged into a socket, and wondered if the point of the installation wasn't for someone to yank the cord out. I was intrigued, but not so much that I was going to be the person to give it a try.
     In his new book, Adam Gopnik refers to "violating the sanctuary of art" with "the displaced ordinary object."  It began with Duchamp's bike wheel, moved through Campbell's Soup cans and now what should be melting in the sun now preserved for ... well, a while.
     In the elevator on the way down, Kent wondered if it was art at all, and I said I thought it was. "Art, in my view, has to be one of three things," I told him. "It has to be clever in concept, masterful in execution or impactful in result." 
     The snowman certainly hits the first mark, touches on the second—a well-made little glass freezer—and got us both to the deck to see it. It isn't "Nighthawks" but it certainly is an asset. I'm not sure if it's permanent, but I hope so. 
      

Donald Trump promised he'd take America back. He didn't say where.

 

    Promises made, promises kept!
     Donald Trump was always talking about how he would "take back America"—there were bumper stickers—and now look, he's actually done it. We've been taken back to the 1960s, with protesters clashing in the street over the weekend and a civil rights demonstrator killed in the street.  
     Or are we back in the 1940s? It felt that way Friday, with torch-bearing Nazis marching, sieg-heiling and chanting "blood and soil." It could have been an America First rally at the old Chicago Stadium in 1940.
      Although they were tiki torches. The bamboo kind costing $1.99 at Costco. That sort of ruined the effect. Give the original Nazis credit; they were sticklers for detail. Real torches are expensive and hard to find, but you're never going to seize control—assuming they haven't already, and with the Trump White House you never know—by cutting corners. Tiki torches in a fascist demonstration are like Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloons at the Nuremberg rallies.
     Sorry. None of this is funny. After three deaths—the protester and two Virginia State troopers who died in a helicopter crash—the clownishly unaware street theater of men whose fondest fantasy is to be concentration camp guards slides into anguish and tragedy.
     Then again, that's what happens, and there's an important lesson there. Whenever I see these idiots, I'm not filled with terror, or concern--and you think I would be, as half the time they're chanting about Jews. Rather, I get an almost avuncular concern. I want to help them, to say, "Guys, guys, gather around. You do know that the whole Nazi thing did not end well for the Germans?" History focuses on their victims, and rightly so, but by the time the would-be supermen were done manifesting their superiority they had lost four million soldiers and another two million civilians. About six million Germans dead, for you fans of irony.

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An old classic reappears on the UVA curriculum

University of Virginia

     Of course it had to start at the University of Virginia.

     Well, no, it didn't have to be the University of Virginia. It just worked out that way.
     Truth is, the white supremacists could have had their march anywhere. There are enough of 'em.
      But UVA somehow fits. Not just for the Robert E. Lee statue.  Though being supported by Nazis—whoops, white nationalists, whoops, the alt-right—kind of takes the wind out of the sails of the disingenuous, we're-just-decent-Southern-folk-celebrating-our-historical-heritage argument, doesn't it?
     You lost; get over it.

     It isn't as if this is racism's first appearance at the University of Virginia and environs.

     Talk about celebrating heritage. 

     We have to keep that in mind. Trump might be wolf-whistling and permission granting, calling ollie-olllie-oxen-free for haters and goose steppers to come out from under their rocks, blinking into the light.
     But they were always there. He didn't invent them. 
     Just the opposite: they invented him. Or at least helped. Let's not blow them out of proportion, particularly since they like to seem bigger than they are. I never heard from a hater in his mother's basement who didn't speak of "we." An army of one. 
     And to pretend this is some awful new development is the kind of self-flattery that looks so unappealing on the right. Our nation is not so much changing into something new as reverting to something old. Something we thought we had escaped but obviously haven't.
     An awful old development.

     Granted, beyond the usual baker's dozen of pimply teens and bowl cut storm troopers. There were a lot of angry white guys with torches Friday night—tiki torches to be sure, the mom's-basement touch that always detracts from the Albert Speer perfection these guys are always lunging at and missing.  
     It would almost be funny except, of course, it's not.

     Particularly after Saturday, with violence spreading around Charlottesville, and a protester plus two state troopers killed—one of the counter-protesters, of course—and the president apportioning blame on both sides.
     The guy who mows people down in a car, the people mown down, potato, po-tah-to, plenty of blame all around. The police quelling the disturbance counterbalancing the haters who sparked it.
     At least Trump renounced his alt-right suppor... oh wait. No, he didn't do that. It's a big tent, Trumpism.

     Back in the good old days, hatred was more subdued, more genteel. When I heard the marchers were at UVA, I couldn't help but recall that racism was so strong there, the school has its own classic poem immortalizing it.
    "University" by Karl Shapiro begins:

"To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew
Is the curriculum...."

     Shapiro had lived in Chicago for a decade as a child, dabbled in poetry, got accepted into UVA—he had a recommendation letter written by William Carlos Williams. 

    He only lasted a year there before dropping out. But not before the school, founded by Jefferson, had left its scars on him, living in a world where his fellow classmates, he later said, saw "Jews as a cut above Negroes but not much."
     Shapiro returned the favor, plunging a knife deep into his school and twisting, though pausing to limn the lovely campus:

     "Where boxwood and magnolia brood
      And columns with imperious stance."

     Then he touches on the human pettiness belying its physical beauty, a place where "equals shake hands, unequals blankly pass." The poem was published in Poetry in October, 1940. Who could have guessed those would be the good old days? Now those so ignorant they imagine themselves superior run their unequals down and kill them.
     Why aren't I as worked up about this development as others seem to be? Maybe because, as awful as the doings in Virginia without question are, they seem a distraction. The threat to our nation posed by whack-job haters is still dwarfed by the threat posed by our whack-job president. And there is comfort to remember that we defeated a far stronger, far more pervasive, far more organized alt-right, whoops, white supremacists, whoops, Nazis before. And we will do so again. If I could tap one of these idiots on the shoulder and tell them one thing, I would say, "Hey Reichmarshal! You know, the whole 'blood and soil' thing didn't work out so well for the Germans. Just a word to the wise, er, I mean, to the stupid."

Don't forget hot dog stands

    The Chicago Hot Dog Fest is this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the Chicago History Museum, Stockton and LaSalle.
     So much discussion of franks involves the encased meat itself, as well as—far too often lately—rehashing of the Ketchup, Condiment of Controversy Conundrum, which I promise I will never address again. It's just getting old. The Reader took that circus pony for another trot around the ring this week.  
     There's more to hot dogs than hot dogs, or condiments. There is, for example, hot dog stands and the often colorful individuals who own them. None more colorful or individual than the great Harry Heftman, of Harry's Hot Dogs at Franklin and Randolph, whom I celebrated on his 100th birthday.

     'You make one person happy," said Harry Heftman, 100 years old today, "it comes back to you."
     The result of a lifetime of dispensing happiness—and hot dogs—turned out Friday to honor Heftman at his small snack shop on the corner of Randolph and Franklin.
     Well-wishers ranged from great-grandson Nathan Heftman, 2, who sat solemnly dipping french fries in ketchup, to Mayor Richard M. Daley, who was a sixth-grader at Nativity Grammar School when Heftman opened the Little Snack Shop on the same spot in 1954, changing its name to Harry's Hot Dogs in 1982.
     "My father used to come here," said Daley, after enjoying a hot dog and a slice of cake.
      "The janitors' union used to be next door," said Harry Heftman, adding that Richard J. Daley ate there twice.
     Harry's sons, Ron and Chuck Heftman, his daughter Lila Ardell, as well as their children, great-grandson Nathan, and various friends, media and well-wishers, including a senior vice president from Vienna Beef, gathered at the famous hot dog stand.
     "It's always been part of all of our lives," said Chuck Heftman. "This store put us all through college."
     "All the grandsons worked at Harry's," said Larry Heftman, who began at 12 and credits working there with inspiring him to study law.
     "This was harder than I wanted to work every day," explained Larry, who eventually graduated from Harvard Law School and became a commercial litigator in downtown Chicago. "We learned hard work from my grandfather."
     To illustrate how well Harry instilled that ethos, his workers continued to serve hot dogs to customers who jammed themselves into the restaurant, even as the mayor held forth for the knot of jockeying TV cameras.
     "Anybody want a hot dog?" asked Marcus Mallett, working the food line.

The past lives, and sells hot dogs

      March 15, 1909, was a Monday.
     At the Auditorium Theater on Congress Parkway, the touring Ziegfeld Follies of 1908 was winding up its final week. Tickets started at 25 cents and rose to $1.
      At Marshall Field & Co., men's shoes in black and tan started at $2.45 and cost as much as $3.45. At Mandel Brothers, shirts that normally cost $2 were selling for 85 cents.
     At 3 a.m., a locomotive carrying Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion of the world, "the only colored man who ever held that title," as the Chicago Daily News put it, arrived at Union Station.
     Despite the early hour, Johnson was met by a throng of Chicagoans.
     Johnson had defeated Canadian Tommy Burns the previous December after chasing him all over the world, and was now hot on the heels of the retired heavyweight champion.
     "I'm after Jim Jeffries now and I'm going to New York in a couple of days to see him," Johnson told the crowd. "I can lick him and he knows it. All I want is to get him in the ring with me."
     March 15, 1909, was before World War I, before the Titanic was built. There are few tangible reminders of it in the city—the Auditorium Theater that hosted the Ziegfeld Follies still stands. And Harry Heftman is still standing too, still selling hot dogs.
      "Lookin' good, Harry! Lookin' good!" exuded Marcus Frisby, who was out of work when Harry hired him, on the spot, nearly 20 years ago.
     "I love him; good man," said Frisby, who has a hot dog stand of his own now at 47th and Calumet.
     Harry was born March 15, 1909, not in Chicago, but in Sojmy, a village in Hungary. He came here in 1921 at the age of 12, which means he arrived in this city before the Wrigley Building was completed, and lived with his family on the West Side, by Division and Western.
     Harry likes people to leave his place happy—even the two robbers who once stuck him up.
      "I said, 'Put the guns down, I'll give you all the money and you'll walk out happy,' and that's what they did," recalled Harry, wearing a bright yellow cardigan and basking in the attention at his packed restaurant.
     One drawback of turning 100 is that people ask your secret of longevity, but with Harry, there was no need—his physician, Dr. Jerry Handler, stopped by, patting him affectionately on the arm. They have known each other for 67 years; Dr. Handler, 81, went to work for Harry at the age of 14, delivering fruit.
      "He's always been a very healthy person," said Dr. Handler. "Extremely oriented toward his family."
     Good habits? I asked.
     "Not a runner, not a drinker," Dr. Handler agreed.
     I said I didn't think jogging was as harmful as drinking.
     "I didn't mean that type of running," Dr. Handler explained.
      After Harry moved into the building, he invited the Showmen's League of America to buy it, which they did.
     "The restaurant carried all the costs of the building for the past 50 years—taxes, insurance, maintenance," said Bill Johnson, past president of the Showmen's League, the union for carnival workers.
     The building is coming down by May, to make a plaza for the skyscraper next door. Harry's Hot Dogs enters the past on April 10, when it closes forever. And Harry Heftman will occupy himself with friends and family. I asked him if, at 100, he feels old.
     "No," he said, smiling.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     Speaking of bad habits. A friend upbraided me for enjoying an occasional cigar, prompting me to invoke Redd Foxx's famous quip about healthy living:
     Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals, dying of nothing.

    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 15, 2009

 

Camp makes cancer "stink less."

Joe Moylan

     Mid-August, nearly. Back-to-school sales starting and summer camps ending. Friday is the last day of Camp Kids Are Kids Chicago.
     Just as at camps everywhere, the last day of Camp Kids Are Kids Chicago will have songs and  hugs and tears.
     Though this is different than most summer camps for two reasons.

   First, all 30 campers attending this week either have or had cancer.
     "Most of them, fortunately, are on the good side of their therapy," said Dr. Charles Hemenway, a pediatric oncologist at Loyola University Medical Center, volunteering as the camp doctor. "They've largely completed, the worst is behind them."
The worst is behind second-year camper Joe Moylan, doing much better this year.
     "I was bald," said the 14-year-old. "I was going through really hard times, going through treatment. It was amazing to do things like any kid could do."
     Moylan joined other campers making strips of fresh pasta under the eye of trained chefs, a reminder of the second unusual aspect of this camp -- it is not held in some distant Michigan woods, but in the heart of the Chicago Loop, at the Palmer House Hilton.

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Book man

Roger Carlson at Bookman's Alley (photo by Marc Perlish)

    Roger Carlson died earlier this week, at age 89. For decades he ran Bookman's Alley, an oasis of used books tucked in the alley behind Sherman Avenue in Evanston. He was an amused, twinkling presence, and I loved his store, and found some of my favorite books there. 
    Maureen O'Donnell gave him a fine send off. 
    I wrote about him a number of times, first in the Daily Northwestern, most recently when I had a signing at the new bookstore in the old Bookman's Alley space in September. This story ran over 30 years ago, and captures a little of his spirit, I hope. Then again, it should: it's very long. That's how we did it in those days. Ironic, now that the internet allows stories to run as long as we please, we keep them very short, because attention spans have shrunk, stunted by the siren call of the infinite variety awaiting us. 
     Notice toward the end how the 26-year-old me handled the fact that Mr. Carlson—as I always called him—was an alcoholic, who began the store as a way to get himself away from the temptations of the magazine ad industry and start life anew. I suppose I thought I was being subtle. 

     A young couple once wandered into Bookman's Alley and spent a half hour or so looking at the shelves filled with old books, walls covered with art and etchings, and displays of antiques, curios and collectibles. On their way out, they stopped by the cluttered desk of owner Roger Carlson and asked if he would ever consider selling any of his books.
     "They must have thought I was some low-rent museum run by the city of Evanston," laughed Carlson.
     Carlson does indeed sell his books, though it's easy to see how the store could be mistaken for something else. Part of the confusion comes from its unusual location. Bookman's Alley is not just a colorful name designed to evoke images of Paris bookstalls. The store actually is in an alley, off Sherman Avenue just north of Evanston's shuttered Varsity Theater. Carlson puts out a green flag in the alley to let people know when the store is open.
     Another reason Bookman's Alley might be mistaken for something else is its decidedly unstorelike atmosphere. Unlike most bookstores, Bookman's Alley has plenty of places to sit: 23 chairs, four couches and three stools, to be exact, not counting the stacks of folding chairs to handle the excess crowd when Carlson hosts occasional live musical events—usually string quartets or ensembles from Northwestern University's music school. Bowls of gumdrops and mints are set out for those who might be taking their lunch hour to pore over "many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore," to quote Edgar Allan Poe.
     The ambience is no accident nor an act of eccentricity, but part of a carefully thought-out plan.
     "It makes me feel comfortable; I like to work in attractive circumstances. I'm doing it quite consciously because I want people who are in here to feel comfortable. I want them to know that I enjoy their being in here. I don't want them to feel pressured. I want this to be an oasis for them. The end product of all this benevolence is I want to make a living and that requires some of them sometimes to buy books."
     The bookstore's location is the result of a compromise between Carlson's vision of what a bookstore should be and his severely restricted financial situation when he opened the store six years ago.
     "I wanted a lot of space. I envisioned using space essentially in the way I've done it - an open space, uncrowded, with lots of opportunity for people to sit down and think about things. I had, in essence, no money; that made it certain I had to find a garage or warehouse building where the rent was in my reach."
     What Carlson found was an old, windowless warehouse that was, ironically, completely isolated and within a half block of Evanston's central business district.
     "There are disadvantages to the location. The kind of person who needs to leave a trail of birdseed to get home has trouble finding this place and, beyond that, being in an alley is not good in a time when people have fears. Alleys do not conjure up the best associations. I once thought of putting an insurance machine at the entrance of the alley, for the small percentage of persons reluctant to enter an alley."
     Interspersed among the rows of books is a Victorian clutter of antiques, collectibles and near-junk plucked from Carlson's collection and cleverly tied in with the books' subjects. Near the shelf marked "Adventure Books" is a snowshoe, a harpoon, an antique model of a kayak, an Eskimo doll, a compass and a framed map from a Byrd Antarctic expedition. In the "Old West" section is a full-sized saddle resting on a sawhorse, along with chaps and several Stetsons hanging from hooks. An old map of Africa and a zebra skin watch over the African books. A detailed model of a three-masted ship, a wooden pulley and an iron double pulley act as bookends on shelves devoted to ships. An ancient Corona portable typewriter holds up books on the Paris Herald, Villard and Chicago press. Tucked in among books in the crafts section is a miniature loom.
     Not all the tableaus are connected to books. Some are just pleasant to look at. Near the blue piano is a small oval empire table. On the table is a silverplate Champagne cooler, filled with fresh-cut flowers, a Japanese enamel bowl, a carved wooden Mexican statuette and an eight-volume set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1825.
     Carlson says he does not expend any particularly great effort assembling his little displays. "They just sort of happen. They're constructed of things either that I was seemingly born with or that I ran into at estate sales or auctions."
     Carlson's personal opinions also manifest themselves in displays. For years, while James Watt was secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior, Carlson hung a sign that announced the expected arrival of Watt's The Endangered Species Cookbook. At the back of the store he posts a "Best Seller's List." It is not the standard list made up of what Carlson sneeringly refers to as "all these popular things on how to make money and analyze yourself." Rather, it is a list of authors Carlson would like to see as best sellers among today's public, names like Hemingway, Wodehouse, Jung, Dickens, Twain, Thoreau, Churchill, Mann, Joyce and Dinesen.
     With all the interesting distractions in Bookman's Alley, it would be a mistake to overlook the books—Carlson estimates he has around 18,000. The vast majority are hardback, with an emphasis on American history and 20th century literature. Carlson also carries a good selection of rare books, autographed volumes and first editions. A glass case displays rarities like a signed 1874 copy of Mark Twain's The Innocents at Home and an 1850 first edition of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. But most of the books fall into the $5 to $10 range, with the most expensive item being a five-volume set of The History of England, published in 1732, selling for $1,200. The cheapest is a bin of books offered free for the taking.
     Adding to the ambience at Bookman's Alley is Carlson himself: a tall, jovial gray-haired man of 58 with an impish grin and twinkling eyes. Except for infrequent occasions—a wedding or an emergency—Carlson is there, usually sitting on a comfortable chair at the front of the store, reading a book.
     "I'm afraid I tend to think I run the place better than anyone I could hire. That's not entirely ego. I know where everything is since I bought it and priced it and shelved it. I have 80 classifications, and sometimes a book could fall into several categories. I know where something belongs. If I'm not here and a person inquires about something, he may well walk out empty-handed, even though the book is here. I would have been able to find it. I have some good friends who play guest host. But I enjoy it enough I don't feel the need for a day off."
     Carlson has been a fan of books for as long as he can remember. As a child he would go to his room at night and, tossing a carpet in front of the door to prevent the light from shining underneath, regularly read until 4 or 5 in the morning.
     Despite his love of books, Carlson did not set out to be a bookseller. His dream was to be a writer, but when he found he lacked the ability, he drifted into advertising sales, a profession that didn't suit him, and which he languished in for years. "It didn't start out being terrible. But it got that way."
     In the late '70s, Carlson took a sobering look at himself, and decided to change his life as an ad salesman. He always had enjoyed reading and collecting books, and began selling them from his home. "I sold by mail and by appointment, rare books and collectible things. But it was clear to me quickly it was no way for me to make a living. You have to spend your day selling books and I didn't want to sell books—I wanted to read them—so I knew I had to have a shop."
     When Carlson first opened his store, he had so little money that he was forced to stock the shelves with several thousand books from his own collection. Carlson takes a pragmatic view of the loss. "It was something I was able to face without any particular problems because I was so close to the wall. It was really sell or die. I could comfort myself with the thought that at least I had the chance to see the books and handle the books."
     Ironically, though he is able to part with first editions of Hemingway and signed copies of Fitzgerald without regret, Carlson does wish he held onto a particular volume —a book by Willard Schultz.
     "It wasn't especially valuable, but the inscription was so great. He was a white man who was raised by the Indians in Montana, I think. This was a book published in the '20s and his inscription was, `So few of us left who lived upon the buffalo.' I thought that was a very sad inscription. I only sold the book for $50 or $60, but it seemed to have a meaning far greater than its monetary value. But at the time I needed the $50."
     Nowadays, things are not quite so tight for Carlson. Business is good, and a poster and framing store has moved into the other building sharing his alley. Carlson can do what he loves most, read books, supported by his friends who stop by to chat, browse, rest, ponder and, occasionally, buy books.
     "A lot of really interesting people come into bookshops. A bookshop can be a nice kind of social center, if that's the way you want to operate, and I do."

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 17, 1986

Unsweet

     Grocery shopping has much weird psychology to it. The one-way doors, the music, the dairy in the back. The allure of end-caps. It doesn't all make sense, but that's people for you.
     Add the nostalgia of familiar brands; reach for a box of Maypo and I'm back in the Pick & Pay with my mom in Berea, Ohio in 1966. The satisfaction of food. The dizzying abundance.  It's never as simple as picking up a loaf of bread.
     I haven't even mentioned price. As a successful man of the world, I seldom pay attention to prices. It's a supermarket; whatever I buy here is going to be far less than the steak sandwich at Gene & Georgetti. The fact that I'm food shopping at all is sacrifice enough; don't ask me to cut coupons too.
     So Toni Preckwinkle's sweetened beverage tax almost blew past me. My heart wasn't awash with sympathy for anyone upset over an additional 12 cents for a can of soda. If that 12 cents helps weave together the fraying social safety net, well, happy to do my civic duty.
     Then my wife came home Sunday waving her Sunset Foods receipt. Dasani sparkling flavored waters, on sale, three eight packs for $6.99. Plus the new Cook County sweetened beverage tax of $2.88.
     Quite a lot really.

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