What's in a name? Sometimes not much

     The only plane I ever missed in my life was missed because of an Italian grocery store.
     Not just any Italian grocery store. Balducci's was a New York landmark for nearly 60 years, on 6th Avenue for the last 40 of those years. During those 6th Avenue years, when I visited the city, which I did a lot back then, to huddle with my agent and publisher and enjoy the sweet delusion that I had a career in books, I would traditionally end my visit by stocking up on rolls of cheese and pastry and pancetta, with elaborate tarts and thick, slightly sweet biscuits. Bottles of vodka infused with raspberries, and loaves of pate, crusty breads and other treats.
     I would bring a couple green, filled shopping bags home to Edie, and we would enjoy a taste of the Manhattan life.
     The time I missed the plane, it was around Christmas, the grocery was packed, and by the time I had taken a number and waited at the deli counter, and taken a number and waited at the bakery, and fought my way here, and decided whether to buy this or that, I had about 45 minutes to get to Newark for my flight and missed it.
     Leading to one of those stories I've repeated dozens of times, to illustrate the value of being nice.
     The woman in front of me had missed the same flight I had missed. She ranted and raged, threatened and demanded.
     "I'm sorry," the employee of the airline—"People Express Airline," a short-lived discount carrier, so this had to be in the early 1980s— behind the counter kept repeating. "I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do. I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." 
      The woman finally stormed off. 
      Now it was my turn.
      "I'm in exactly the same situation as that woman was in," I said, meekly, "only I realize it was entirely my fault and I appreciate anything you can do for me."
      "No problem," the clerk said briskly, "I can book you onto the next flight. It leaves in 60 minutes."
      True story.
      Despite this brush with inconvenience, I kept going to Balducci's, until it shut down in 2003 after 57 years in business. I tried not to think about it much. Nothing good lasts.
     Balducci's lingered in other spots in New York until 2009, but I never went to those outlets. For me, it was Sixth Avenue or nowhere.
     Then last month, I was in Philadelphia, during research at the Children's Hospital for my next Mosaic piece, to be published in early June. The storm socking the East Coast caused American Airlines to cancel the 11 a.m. to Chicago, compelling them, for reasons mysterious, to stick me on a flight to Cincinnati, which was immediately cancelled, moving me to a flight to Louisville, which was also cancelled, then brought back to life, and I was so happy to not be spending the night in the Philly airport that, frankly, the American Airlines clerk, who was not that helpful despite my being really, really polite, could have reached across the counter and slapped me full in the face and I would have thanked him if it meant I was getting on that plane. It was like the ending of "The Year of Living Dangerously."
     Things were far less nuts in Louisville, the sleepy airport so welcome I thought perhaps I should immediately relocate to some sylvan community and be done with people and news and business and crowded airports facing storms. I was exploring, looking to have lunch at a restaurant with a whiff of Kentucky—they had one, but it was a Chili's—and I came upon a store boldly labelled "Balducci's."
     My heart leapt. I walked into the store as if in a trance, expecting cases of cheeses and little twisted Italian cookies and intriguing loafs and enticing breads.
    Nope. A single Balducci's labelled product: cans of chocolate covered peanuts, which I didn't even remember from back in the day. And the cans were not the distinctive Balducci's green and white. Otherwise, the same sandwiches and chips and bags of M&Ms you'd find in any airport anywhere. They must have bought the name forgetting all the quality and wonder that went with the name. There's a lot of that going around.
     A bit of digging found this line from a New York Times story in 2009:
     "Some regulars said Balducci’s lost its soul after Sutton Place Gourmet bought the store for $26.5 million in 1999. The company closed the flagship location four years later, and then opened and rebranded other shops under the Balducci name."
     Ah, they thought they were buying something special. Turns out it wasn't the name that was special, but the spirit of quality behind it. Without that spirit, it's just another word. You'd think business folk would know that.

WXRT's Terri Hemmert at 70: 'There's a pay-off, a balance, if you do it right'

Terri Hemmert (photo by Mary Lafferty) 

    A city like Chicago is always changing. Out with the old: goodbye Marshall Field's, Sear's Tower and a competitive Bulls team. In with the new: hello Macy's, Willis Tower and Fred Hoiberg.
     A few good things don't change, however. Terri Hemmert, the friendly midday voice on WXRT 93.1 FM, both DJ and station bedrock in a shifting city. Hemmert is heard daily from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., as well as her "Breakfast with the Beatles" Sunday mornings. She has been spinning records—then CDs, then Wave files, which don't actually spin—since I was in the 7th grade.
     Hemmert turns 70 Saturday. I caught up with her a few hours before she flew to New Orleans for, she estimates, the 30th time, to revel in this weekend's Jazz and Heritage Festival.
     "I've been way too busy, overwhelmingly busy. I'm worn out," she said, not sounding worn out at all. "Everybody keeps saying: you can relax when you get to New Orleans. And I tell them: 'you've never been there, have you?'"

As a child in Piqua, Ohio, practicing her future career. 

     Here Hemmert laughed, something she does often and well.
     Did she mind my spotlighting her turning 70?
     "Oh no, that's okay," she said. "People know, if they do the math. I'm coming up on my 45th anniversary. It beats being dead. As [fellow 'XRT dj] Lin Brehmer says, 'It's great to be alive.' I was so unhealthy as a child; I had rheumatic fever. They didn't think I would make it to my 40s."
     Ever think about retiring?
     "Why walk away as long as they want me here?" she asked. "I'm happy here. I have a million things to do that are still compelling to me, still fun. I still get to do something for someone, and if you're not doing something for other people, you're not living right. This gives me a lot of opportunities to do that. Teaching."
     She has taught college for more than 30 years....

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Abandoned Babies Week, #2: 'Please take good care of him'

Baby Monsarrat, by Clarence H. White (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     April is Safe Haven Month in Illinois, and before the month is out I wanted to reprint a few columns I've written over the years on the subject. This was originally headlined "Abandoning our kids, then and now." It could not be written today because reporters no longer have access to the Sun-Times clip file, which is stored in Addison, supposedly.

     They put the babies in shopping bags. In laundry baskets. In pasteboard boxes.
     They carried them to tavern restrooms. To ash cans. To park benches. To shrubbery. Then they left them.
     The past is a foreign country, the saying goes; they do things differently there. And as universal as the act of abandoning a child may seem, they did it differently in the 1940s, as I learned after finding an envelope of old newspaper clippings marked "CHILDREN -- ABANDONED: 1950 AND PRIOR" and entering a world both very strange and sadly familiar.
     The heart-wrenching notes struck me first. The mothers wanted to explain:
     "I'd give my soul to keep her myself but what sort of life would she have being born out of wedlock? This is the best way I know," wrote the woman who left her baby in the Milner Hotel in Fort Wayne, Ind., in 1946, phoning the clerk afterward and asking him to "take care of the valuables left in Room 138."
     That was typical. They wanted the babies found.
     The mother of a 2-week-old boy left in the shrubs across from 2440 Lakeview in July, 1945, phoned police and told them where to look. The same night, a 6-week-old girl was found in the hallway at 4840 S. Paulina. The mother had awakened residents, then fled.
     The notes tout bloodlines and tweak finders toward pity.
     "Please take good care of him—I can't keep him—Haven't the money—But I love him—Born June 29, 1941," read a note on the baby found in a pew at St. Mary's Catholic Church.
     Mothers left poignantly precise instructions: "He gets baby cereal three times daily and orange juice once and cod liver oil," read a note pinned to the blue sweater of the 5-month-old baby boy left in the foyer of 1726 Augusta, in 1949. "He has a light cold and I fear for his health. He takes eight ounces six times daily. I left my home and I do not know what to do.
     "Maybe somebody can do better than I can."
     They were abandoning their children, but with an eye toward their welfare. The woman who asked a stranger to watch her 6-week-old boy at the La Salle Street train station "for a few minutes" never returned. But she left behind a little suitcase of baby clothes.
     "Please take care of my baby," read a note on a stroller containing a chubby toddler left in the foyer of a home at 4011 N. Lowell. "I can't afford to take care of him any longer. Please don't turn him out."
     Sometimes they didn't.
     Switchman Jack Bowen, who had four boys, found a newborn girl in a pasteboard box under a railroad viaduct near 45th Street in 1944, and said he'd like to adopt her. Mrs. Francis Weprin already had a newborn in 1942, but when she discovered a 10-day-old in a white bonnet in her building's foyer, she offered to keep him anyway.
     I do not want to suggest that women did not leave their babies to die in freezing alleys in the 1940s. They did. They murdered their babies and mailed the bodies to the post office.
     But such callousness was the exception; lately it seems the rule. Mothers of today do not leave notes, according to Chicago police. "They don't want to get caught," a spokeswoman said.
     The problem was seen as a crisis then.
     "Unwanted, neglected and abandoned children are becoming Chicago's biggest headache," columnist Sydney J. Harris wrote in 1944. "Social workers admit they are almost licked. Police can do little. The courts fume, but are impotent to halt the wave of derelict mothers who leave their children."
     The crisis isn't so keenly felt today. Which is odd, because in 1946, there were 4,200 children in Cook County being cared for by the state.
     Last year, that number was 35,559.
                       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 8, 1998

'The world wouldn't be a world without the newspaper.'

Labor, by Will Barnet (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 

     You know what's hard work? Deboning whitefish. A machine can't do it. So a guy stands in a chilled room—has to be chilled so the fish won't spoil. He runs his bare—has to be bare, so he can feel the pin bones—left hand over the whitefish, while the right one pulls out the nearly-invisible bones with a needle-nosed pliers.
     I know this because I once watched it done. And what did the whitefish deboner talk about? How fortunate he was to have his job. How happy it made him.
     That stuck with me, and explains why I winced, a little, at the Sun-Times' new slogan: "The hardest-working newspaper in America."
     My first thought was: "How do we know? Did we study all the other newspapers? Because otherwise we've installed a lie atop the front page."
     Loyal employee that I am, or try to be, I groped for a bright spin: "mere puffery," as my lawyer friends would say. Like "World's Best Coffee." Why not? The Tribune called itself "The World's Greatest Newspaper," for half a century (a boast fossilized in the call letters "WGN") and that wasn't true either.
     So I understand why “hard-working” now appears on every page of our print editions. What is the task of this newspaper? Only absorbing everything happening now in the entire world with an emphasis on Chicago and Illinois. Filter out the superfluous and present the essential events in a completely accurate and public form within a few minutes of their occurring. Do so, lately, in an environment where bald lies are boldly uttered at the highest levels while preserving a reputation for accuracy so great that our mistakes are remembered forever. “IT’S REAGAN AND FORD” a Sun-Times front page headline trumpeted about the 1980 presidential ticket. It wasn’t.

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Abandoned Babies Week, #1: "You never forget seeing a dead baby"

    

Daguerreotype of a dead baby, 1840s (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     
     April is Safe Haven month, a reminder that, for the first 30 days after giving birth, new mothers who cannot care for their infants can leave them, no questions asked, at fire houses, police stations and hospitals. Since the law was passed in 2001, at least 126 babies in Illinois have been sent on their way toward loving homes in this fashion, and saved the risk of dying after being abandoned, as often happens to newborns who are not delivered to a secure location. 
    I've written about the law over the years, and this week will be posting a couple of those columns here. This one was originally headlined "Show your concern over real babies."


     You never forget seeing a dead baby. This one was maybe a month old, perfect features, mouth slightly open, bluish skin, swaddled in a blanket, waiting its turn on a stainless steel table at the Cook County Medical Examiner's office on Harrison Street.
     Nearly 20 years later, I can see the baby as if it were in front of me now. My buddy, the photographer Robert A. Davis, and I were doing a profile of the first Cook County medical examiner, Dr. Robert Stein. We had been watching Dr. Stein work since 5 a.m., and we hadn't flinched at the man who had laid on the floor of a transient hotel for two weeks in the August heat (well, OK, a little flinching when the sheet was first drawn back), or the young guy shot through a lung, or any of the other unfortunates who had been rolled in and cut up.
     But the baby seemed a different matter entirely. Neither Bob nor I had kids yet, but we both must have known they were coming, because something told us that, story or no story, this wasn't a deposit we wanted to make in the old memory banks.
     "C'mon," I said, nodding toward the door. "Union-mandated coffee break." We left the baby to Dr. Stein.
     I mention this, because when young women abandon their babies, it often means not only a slow, painful death for the baby -- which would be bad enough -- but also a grisly discovery for whatever poor person stumbles upon the baby too late. A dead baby is hard enough to see in the morgue, where you expect it. I can't imagine what it does to a person who opens a trash can and finds one.
     Tuesday is National Safe Haven Day, which Gov. Quinn has declared is Save Abandoned Babies Day in the state.
      Illinois passed a temporary Safe Haven law in 2001, designating hospitals and fire stations as places where new mothers could abandon their unharmed newborns without fear of legal repercussion.
     Originally the babies had to be 3 days old or younger, but after the law was made permanent in 2005, it was expanded to cover infants up to 30 days old, and police stations were included.
     The Save Abandoned Babies Foundation estimates that 55 Illinois infants have been turned over to state care because of the law, including Lilli, whose mother left her at Engine 98's firehouse in 2008.
     "We are so grateful that our daughter's birth mom knew about the law and was brave enough to follow through on that plan," said Lilli's adoptive mom, Carrie, a northwest suburban woman who didn't want her last name used out of privacy concerns.
     "In her case she didn't know she was pregnant, she had delivered the baby at home, and knew enough about the law [that] she knew she would be able to bring her to the fire station."
     Lilli is now 2, and likes baby dolls and books.
     "Lilli has helped make our family complete," said her mother. "She's so, so cute. We couldn't imagine our lives without her."

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR

     The clattering sound you hear is dozens of anti-abortion activists pounding away at their keyboards. "Dear Stinkberg," they write, "how can you even pretend to care about babies when you approve of women murdering their children in the uterus?? Please see the attached 12 color photographs of aforementioned diced children . . . ."
     And the answer — not that they are interested in an answer, but let's pretend — is that I, like most Americans, differentiate between actual, born-and-alive-in-the-real-world-now babies and the fertilized egg the size of the period at the end of this sentence that typically gets aborted.
     This of course flies by the anti-choice crowd, who have deemed these "babies" with such forceful finality that I'm sure the idea that they're simply locked into a convenient fantasy will shock, amuse and offend them. They've found their label, their metaphor, their easy code word, and they're sticking with it, just the way that the hate-immigration crowd has seized on the word "illegal," and though try as you may, nothing will make them perceive the falsity of their stratagem. ("Really? Concerned about illegal immigration only because it's illegal? What other 'illegal' things are you really worked up about? Just illegal immigration, huh? Nothing else? Thought so. Hmmmm. . . maybe it's the immigration part and not the 'illegal' part then, cause there's a lot more illegal stuff that you're ignoring. . . .")
     Caring for actual babies is hard, and the state struggles to find enough foster homes to park them in. That's another reason why people gin up this outsized concern for other people's non-babies: It's easy. You can stand in the street holding a 5-foot photo of a tiny bloody foot, call it a day, tell yourself you've saved a lot of babies, when in reality you haven't changed one diaper. Merely professed your undying concern for proto babies, which hardly exist, and ignored a bunch of baby babies, who most certainly do exist and could use your help. And you felt morally superior to boot. Congrats.
     Just wanted to put in my two cents, because these people act as if nobody else thinks about these things except them. Most people give this matter careful consideration, even those who are dismissed as hell-bound whores murdering their infants.
     Respect for life means respecting those who are actually alive, even if they make decisions that go contrary to your personal religious scruples. It's a tough-to-grasp concept, I know, particularly if you don't even try to understand.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 12, 2010

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition to Beto O'Rourke

   

     "We have to hope and pray that things turn around in November," a friend said over dinner on Friday.
     I felt a muscle in my jaw tense.
     "If only Ted Cruz could be defeated in the Senate," a Facebook friend mused. "But I'm not holding my breath. Texas is a red state ... So I wouldn't bet on Cruz losing this year. But I can dream, can't I?"
     Hope. Pray. Dream. A certain peasant fatalism has crept into Democratic thinking.
     Not without reason. Our nightmare president builds his cult of personality every day while the party supporting him sheds its values and beliefs, rolling at his feet like puppies.
     Yet surrender is premature. Our nation was not forged and preserved by a bunch of quitters.
     So while I try to religiously avoid all Facebook debates as pointless time sinks, I couldn't resist commenting after his "dream" remark: "Well, that and send Beto O'Rourke money. I am."
     Everyone knows who Ted Cruz is. The most hated man in the Senate. "Lucifer in the flesh," in John Boehner's memorable description. But who is Beto O'Rourke? He is the Democrat running against Cruz this November and doing surprisingly well. Last week, a new poll showed a close race, Cruz leading 47 to 44 percent. O'Rourke has raised more money than Cruz, thanks to small donors such as myself.
     No Democrat has won statewide office in Texas in 24 years, so it's a long shot. But Satan's senator is obviously scared.
     Even before O'Rourke's victory in the March 6 primary was confirmed, his campaign aired a radio commercial mocking O'Rourke's first name, accusing him of changing it to appeal to voters. In response, O'Rourke released a photo of himself as a toddler, wearing a sweater with "Beto" — his nickname since birth — stitched across the front.
     Cruz's actual first name is "Rafael," a reminder that Trump does not hold monopoly on either deceit or hypocrisy.

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Cookie dough wins

     "Pick up some romaine lettuce," my wife said on Monday. 
      I was going to the supermarket and asked what we needed.
     "Okay honey," I said. Romaine hearts were on sale, two packages for $4. Seemed like a deal, because usually they cost three or four bucks apiece. Though we already had a package at home, I eat a salad almost every day. No harm in stocking up. The stuff lasts a while.
     "Throw away the romaine lettuce," my wife said on Wednesday, pointing to a Centers for Disease Control directive that romaine might be tainted with deadly E-coli.
     "Okay honey," I said, thinking, guess that's why it was on sale. 
     I'll be honest. Left to my devices, I would take my chances and just eat the stuff, washing it first, as I always do—a vigorous dousing in the salad spinner—Get behind me, Satan! All you germs, down the drain!
     It's not that I'm against caution. I wear my seatbelt and my bicycle helmet, usually. I look both ways crossing the street and own a variety of insurance.
     But certain kinds of caution are a bridge too far. The worry about salmonella from cookie dough, for instance. I once crunched the numbers for getting salmonella from raw eggs, and they're infinitesimal. Which means, in a country of ... check ... 325 million people (crikey, I thought it was 310 million; they'r reproducing like rabbits!) that somebody is going to get salmonella from raw eggs. But it probably won't be you. So grab a spoon and scrape away, clutching the big stainless steel mixing bowl to your chest, going after that delicious dough, beaming like a child, as primal a joy as there can be (well, ahem, ignoring a primal joy or two).
    Why pitch the lettuce but eat the cookie dough? A good question, and one that deserves a logical answer.
     We can eliminate the listen-to-your-wife factor, because she certainly shook her finger in my face vigorously about the cookie dough, to which I responded with a shrug and a lick of the wooden spoon.
     If that isn't it, then what?
     In the case of the lettuce, the tiny risk of sickness is weighed against the loss of a $4 investment in produce (it's not worth four bucks to spend 45 minutes returning it to Jewel, assuming they would take it back, which they might not). It's not worth $4 to risk getting sick. Caution wins. 
     In the case of the cookie dough, the tiny risk of sickness is balanced against a lifetime of eating raw cookie dough when the opportunity arises. As barren a prospect that can be imagined, especially in a life where a few pleasures have already been pitched over the side in the name of survival. So in the tug-of-war between tiny risk of sickness and decades worth of cookie dough, cookie dough wins.
     Make sense?