A Jay Bushinsky memory

Jay Bushinksy

     Robert Feder reports that Jay Bushinsky died Wednesday at his home in Israel at age 85 (sixth item). That brought a smile to my face—not because of his passing, I'm not that much of a bastard. 
     But at my single Jay Bushinsky memory, which I will attempt to reconstruct.   
     For many years he was the Sun-Times Jerusalem bureau, which itself evokes a whistle of wonder. But he would get back to Chicago from time to time, and one of those visits he was speaking to a local Arab group's dinner, briefing them on the Situation in the Middle East.
     I can't remember which group or when this occurred.  But I must have been working one of those awkward evening shifts—say 4 p.m. to 12 midnight. Most reporters would bring a sack lunch but, grandiose fellow that I am, given to comforting myself with pleasures, I would take myself to dinner. And this particularly night, facing another empty evening, I had slid over to a sushi emporium and loaded up. Back in the late 1980s there were more sushi places downtown than there are today. 
     Upon my return to the paper, an editor told me to hustle my ass over to some location and cover the remarks our own Jay Bushinsky was giving, before this Arab group.
     That too was a dinner, and my memory is rolling up, bloated with raw fish and vinegar rice, and having these very solicitous Arab folks around a big table gently urging foodstuffs on me while Bushinsky spoke.
     "You must try this," they would say, "we call it hummus. It is delicious." "Please sample some of this fallafel. You will like it." 
     I tried, in my most polite fashion, to explain that I had just eaten dinner, and this fare, rather than being unfamiliar, was my own people's food as well. I wish I could but I can't. That didn't work, and I ended up having to eat a bit, just to satisfy them.
     That's it. There is a second, shadow memory, a faint echo: that the attendees at the dinner were not pleased with Jay and whatever he had to say. Maybe I wasn't either, because I remember kind of cringing. Maybe because he was telling them the truth and I was too uninformed to recognize it. Maybe because he was off-base. I can no longer recall. 

   

Aunt Jemima welcomes us into an 1893 World’s Fair that’s not so fun to recall

     Sometimes the obvious sit in plain sight, unnoticed, until someone points it out.
     Despite a lifetime of eating hot dogs, a connection eluded me until I attended Northwestern literature professor Bill Savage’s lecture about ketchup during the Chicago History Museum’s Hot Dog Fest three years ago and he casually dropped the bomb.
     “Two immigrant brothers came here and in 1893, at the World’s Fair, had the brilliant idea to put a viener, a Viennese sausage, in a bun, and voila, the hot dog is born, or at least the Vienna Beef hot dog is born.”
     Ohhh, Vienna led to wiener just as Frankfurt led to frankfurter. Makes sense.
     With the 125th anniversary of the opening of the World’s Columbian Exposition May 1, expect fond visits to Chicago’s debut in the global spotlight. The fair’s impact stays with us, in the many products debuted: from Vienna Beef to Aunt Jemima pancakes, from the Ferris wheel to the zipper. The blue ribbon that Pabst beer boasts of on every can was awarded at the 1893 fair. 
     Wait a sec. Aunt Jemima Pancakes … hmm … maybe we better skip that one. Awkward. Uncomfortable.
     Besides, the product had really debuted a few years earlier. The creators of Aunt Jemima went bankrupt in 1890, and a second company relaunched the brand at the fair, hiring a South side cook and former slave named Nancy Green to wear an apron and kerchief and dole out pancakes.
     Too late to turn back now. Anyway, speaking of impact that lingers, Aunt Jemima, and the uncomfortable racial stereotypes clustered around her can do more than ballyhoo pancakes. She also welcomes us to consider an aspect of the fair that, while not as eagerly appreciated as hot dogs or beer, is just as current and far more important.
     In 1890, when the Chicago fair was first being planned, black Americans tried be included in the great exposition—to see their achievements highlighted and celebrated. The Civil War had been over for 25 years. They were citizens now. They had legal rights, supposedly.
     Their effort failed, entirely. No members of the fair committee formed by President Benjamin Harrison were black. There was a representative from Alaska, but when African-American groups officially complained, the president responded that there was just no room.
     "The embarrassment of being ignored by the White House was almost matched by the embarrassment of begging for what Negroes regarded as their right of representation," one historian noted.
     Blacks couldn't even get jobs as guards at the fair. They would try, and be turned away. Of the 65,000 displays and exhibits at the fair, none highlighted the achievements of an African-American.
     Not that they were excluded entirely. White organizers brought in villagers from Western Africa and set them up in a thatched enclosure.
     "As if to shame the Negro," Frederick Douglass wrote, "the Dahomians are also here to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage."
     Douglass contributed to a cri di coeur issued by Ida B. Wells. Fresh from a speaking tour of England, she wasn't about to yield the fair to Nancy Green and her pancakes and happy tales of plantation life. Wells printed 20,000 copies of an 80-page booklet titled, "THE REASON WHY the Colored American is not Included in the World's Columbian Exposition" and had them distributed to fairgoers.
     The preface states:
     "At Jackson Park are displayed exhibits of [America's] natural resources, and her progress in the arts and sciences, but that which would best illustrate her moral grandeur has been ignored. The exhibit of the progress made by a race in 25 years for freedom as against 250 years of slavery, would have been the greatest tribute to the greatness and progressiveness of American institutions which could have been shown the world."
     Casting a wide net, the preface was also written in French and German.
     Much of the pamphlet was taken up with lynching, which would peak in 1894. Douglass' introduction, if you substitute execution by skittish cops for lynching, could have been written yesterday.
     "No proof of guilt is required," he wrote. "It is enough to accuse, to condemn and punish the accused with death."
     The pamphlet laid out heartbreaking documentation of black achievement in the arts and sciences, including lists of patents, who could have had a place at the fair, if only society allowed such a thing.
     It would be a double irony if today we looked back warmly at this fair as a high water mark and ignored, once again, the lives of those who were excluded.
     Sometimes the obvious sit in plain sight unnoticed until someone points it out.

The Crime and Punishment of Jean Gump, Pt. II

Peace Museum, Hiroshima

     This is the second part of a two-part story on Jean Gump, the anti-nuclear activist who died March 16. You can read the first part here. 

     Yet, during the half hour she was at the missile site, she was not afraid.
     "It was really interesting," she said. "I expected I would be paralyzed with fear. But it didn't happen that way. I felt kind of good. I felt like singing. It was an easy thing to do, because it was so right."
     Along with their news release the group had prepared a six-page document headlined, "Today we sound the alarm!" It outlined the group's beliefs—that nuclear weapons are an unconscionable peril that must be resisted by all good people—and presented a legally phrased indictment of the government of the United States for "development, deployment and willingness to use nuclear weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction" and against the institutional Christian church for "its complicity in preparing for mass murder of the earth's people."
     After her arrest, Gump was taken to the Federal lock-up in Kansas City, Mo, interviewed by F.B.I. agents, and then, to her vast surprise, released on a signature bond. On Easter Sunday she had dinner at the home she thought she would never see again.
     The trial took place in June 1986 on the sixth floor of the Kansas City Federal Courthouse, in courtroom 666. Gump, with her finely tuned sense of the symbolic, points out that the number 666 is the biblical sign of apocalyptic evil in the Book of Revelation.

Jean Gump

     The accused decided to serve as their own counsel, seeking legal advice from several sympathetic lawyers and from Gump's son Joseph, who is a third-year law student at DePaul.
     Kansas City attorney Henry Stover reviewed transcripts of earlier trials with the five, trying to give them an idea of what kind of witnesses the government would call and the sort of testimony they could expect. Stover says that, while self-representation was not the smartest legal tactic, it was an extension of the group's protest.
    "I think, from their perspective, it was a way to meet the jury more often," Stover says. "So often at a criminal trial the defendant just sits there, and in many cases does not take the witness stand. This way, each took turns, asking witnesses questions. At conferences at the bench with the judge, they actually got to express themselves fully. They had more opportunity for a conversion, personal conversion, to take place."
     The government's case was simply. these five people—Gump, Morlan and Rippetoe were tried along with Darla Bradley, 22, and John Volpe, 39, who committed a similar "action" at a nearby missile silo the same morning, and were also part of the Silo Plowshares group) had conspired to break into a national defense facility and destroy property vital to the defense of the country. There was no question of guilt—a national television network had filed it, after all—and motive was irrelevant.
     The Plowshares employed a version of the "necessity defense." The necessity defense acknowledges that, in certain dire situations, a person can act illegally because of overwhelming circumstances. For instance, if upon seeing a house on fire and a person yelling from the upper window, you broke into the house to rescue that person, and the owner of the house for some reason decided to press breaking-and-entering charges, you would use the necessity defense to excuse what would otherwise be an illegal act.
     In this case, the Plowshares argued the overwhelming danger of nuclear weaponry was, in effect, the moral equivalent of a house on fire, calling for their illegal actions.
     Judge Elmo B. Hunter would not permit the defense.
     "That type of argument," he said later, "if it were recognized [in court] would lead to a near anarchy situation. Every person has an ideal in which they believe, and the total result would approximate anarchy. You might have a kick on abortion. I might have a kick on the Sanctuary movement, and another might have a kick on the gold standards. If we are to pick and choose what laws are to obey, there is no law.
     With their basic defense ruled impermissible in court, the Plowshares had little chance for anything other than a guilty verdict, which the jury reached after deliberating for one hour and 47 minutes. Gump says that before reading their verdict, the jury asked Judge Hunter for permission to deliver, along with it, some sort of apology, but Judge Hunter denied permission. Judge Hunter says that no such request was ever made. "I don't know where she dreamed that up," he says.
     According to Stover, who has been involved with several Plowshare defenses, more than 700 pieces of mail were delivered to the courthouse, asking for leniency. The actual count of mail, kept on file at the courthouse, is closer to 35 letters.
     Judge Hunter sentenced Ripetoe, Bradley, Morlan and Gump to eight years in prison, followed by five years of probation. Volpe, in consideration of his three young children, aged 4, 8 and 9, was given a reduced sentence—seven years in prison. At sentencing, he offered to cut the sentences in half if the five would pay the several thousand dollars damages claimed by the government (Gump's share was $424.48). All five refused.
      The length of the prison terms surprised some people, but Judge hunter denies that the sentences were unnecessarily severe. "I wouldn't use 'severe' because of the circumstances," he says. "Very substantial, yes, but they're not severe because part of the reason for sentencing people is to get a deterrent effect—trying to deter that person and others in the public who might be tempted to do the same thing."
     After sentencing, the plowshares sent a series of personal, impassioned letters to Judge Hunter, trying to prick his conscience over his decision. ("Sometimes I wish we had said more at our sentencing, for I really had the feeling of being a lamb led silently to the slaughter," wrote Ken Rippetoe in the middle of a 2,000-word document cheerily titled "Greetings Judge Hunter!")
      "I wondered to myself, 'Are they abusing him because they're so forcefully approaching him on this issue?" says Stover.
     In retrospect, Judge Hunter feels his beliefs—in respect for law and a just society—permitted him no other choice than to give Gump the sentence he did.
     "I take no pleasure out of her situation," he says. "It's simply that she has made it impossible for me or any other judge to do anything appreciably different from what I did ... I don't care if they advocate their cause to the whole world as long as they do it using legal means and don't break the criminal law. They don't have a corner on fearing atomic warfare; we all fear it. They don't have a corner on wanting peace; we all want peace. They know they can advocate their cause in dozens and dozens of legal ways, most of them more effective than the one they've chosen, the illegal way."
     The government views Gump as a criminal. And, for some, the story ends there. but the temptation, given the circumstances, is to ask whether or not she is a fool, a Cassandra or a martyr.
    After all, while it was her crime that put her in Judge Hunter's courtroom, it was her refusal to recant that put her in prison. A few mea culpas, a check for $428.48, and Gump could very well be home now in Morton Grove. Whether this is foolishness or personal courage depends solely on how you view the delicate interaction between the individual and the state. Many people probably won't understand why she didn't pay the money and avoid the sentence. Others might never even think to ask the question.
     In Gump's eyes the illegality of the act is meaningless. She uses the example of Nazi Germany. Those who opposed the Nazis, though "lawbreakers" to the ruling order, were honored by later generations. Whether Gump, and people like her, will be similarly revered in the future probably depends on what that future brings. if, someday, the disarmament movement grips this country the way the civil rights movement once did, Gump might be viewed as a sort of Rosa Parks, whose insistence on riding in the front of the bus, while landing her in jail, sparked a movement.
     On the other hand, if another 40 years go by without the use of nuclear weapons, if the weapons turn out to be in fact "peace-keepers," then Gump's actions might, ironically, be viewed as having been contrary to the interests of peace.
     if the missiles are used, and anyone remains to sort through the past and care about it, perhaps Gump and the Plowshares will be seen as a small cadre of people who looked ahead and saw the true future, something like John Brown and his raiders, who seized the arsenal at Harpers' Ferry in 1859, hoping to set off a slave uprising, and were condemned as traitors and hung by the federal government, the same government that would be fighting for Brown's cause less than two years later.
     Gump has become bitter. "Americans—they've lived the soft life," she says. "They're a marshmallow country. Everybody wants peace and nobody wants to pay for it. I wouldn't want to go back to Morton Grove—they're living in a utopia. It's really an illusion. People shop at Field's."
     From prison, Gump looks out and sees a government that works, "hand in glove," with the media. She sees a prison system set up, primarily, to get cheap labor from prisoners. She compares Judge Hunter to Adolf Hitler, and sees his refusal to permit the mention of international law in his courtroom as being predictable, since "Hitler wouldn't have permitted Nuremberg trials."Defense, she believes, has nothing to do with the existence of nuclear weapons—they are created purely for the profit for the big defense contractors.
     But to examine Gump's politics too closely is to miss her central driving force, the impetus that put her, and the other Plowshares, atop that silo on Good Friday: Catholicism. Bible quotations and religious imagery are found throughout her writings, and while she denies her going to jail is an act of martyrdom, her explanation of her actions is, at the core, a religious one.
     "I don't know how a person could come at it other than from a religious perspective," she says.
     Gump is not advocating general social action—not encouraging people to read, write, think, march or care about nuclear weapons. She wants people to go to the missile sites and "disarm" the missiles. Period. All other antinuclear actions are a sop to the government.
     "Disarmament occurs when we disarm a weapon and in the 20 years I worked, not one missile was ever disarmed," she says. "As a matter of fact, three to five a day were manufactured. So all the work in the political area was wasted. Our government allows us to march in the street with signs because it is ineffectual."
     An explanation of Jean gump's actions is offered by her husband, Joe. "I liken it to the crucifixion syndrome," he says, "where individuals take upon themselves the suffering of the world in order to redeam the world."
     Joe Gump has put the house on Linder up for sale. They had planned to do so before last March, he says, because it seemed so empty with all the children grown and gone. With Jean gone, it seems even emptier. Joe, like Jean, would prefer to talk about the issues and not about "personalities," but he will, sitting in their immaculate Early American living room, with knickknack cabinets and embroidery on the wall, talk about the changes in his life.
     "It's something you try to find a way of adjusting yourself to," he says. "I always have had complete confidence in what she's done. We've been married 37 years, and we met four years before that. I can't say I was enthused at the prospect of being separated from your wife. It's difficult to live with."
     Gump's friends get together, now and then, to exchange copies of her letters and discuss the situation. The impact of Gump's action affects them differently. 
     "We all realize that we're cowards," says Carmen Pappas. "We're enjoying the goodies and don't want to join Jean in Jail." Isabell Condit doesn't feel like a coward.
     "I don't agree with her on a lot of things. I think she's a little extreme when she talks about the government. I think she's a little extreme when she talks about disarmament in the face of a perceived enemy. I believe in what Lincoln said when asked what you do with an enemy. He said you make him a friend."
     At the Federal Correctional Institution at Alderson, Jean Gump lives in a room with nine other convicts. There is little privacy. and Gump likes to wake up early and spend time alone in the day room, writing letters. She has a job. From 7:45 a.m. to 3:45 p.m., with a half hour for lunch, she works in the prison greenhouse, raising plants for the prison. She earns 11 cents an hour.
     According to the terms of her sentence, she is eligible for parole in January of 1991, but she feels her chances of parole are slight, because she will neither pay restitution nor agree to cooperate with the terms of the parole. In fact, if released she might very well grab the bolt cutter and head for the nearest silo. "I will die in prison," she says.
     If she goes in search of a silo, she won't have trouble finding some. There are more than 1,000 in the U.S., equally divided between Minuteman II and Minuteman III missiles. The Minuteman II (The type of missile at the silo Jean Gump broke into) is 57 feet tall, weighs about 36 tons, and if fired, could deliver a thermonuclear warhead with the explosive power of a million tons of TNT to a target 7,000 miles away within 20 minutes. But none has ever been fired. Yet.
     —Originally published in North Shore magazine, February 1987

     Note: The United States now maintains 399 missile silos, less than half the amount it did when this story was written.

The Crime and Punishment of Jean Gump

     The New York Times ran Jean Gump's obituary on Sunday, reporting that she died March 16 while visiting a daughter in Louisville. 
      That immediately snapped me back more than 30 years, to when I visited Gump in prison in West Virginia. I had seen a brief notice in the Tribune—"Morton Grove grandmother sent to prison"—or some such thing and immediately wanted to know more.
       I suggested to a Sun-Times editor—I was freelancing at the time—that I go interview Gump. Even then, I knew the paper would never pop for a motel, at least not for me. But I did a bit of digging, and found there's an Amtrak station by the federal prison in Alderson. It's a 20 hour trip.
     "I could take the train, get off, conduct the interview, then catch another train coming back and you wouldn't have to pay for a hotel," I told the paper.
     No thanks, they said.
     Undeterred, I pitched that at North Shore, a fairly vibrant magazine at the time. They not only covered the trip, but paid me $500 for the story, which was more than the paper would have ponied up. 
     A person like Gump is invariably depicted as a selfless martyr—that's how the Times portrayed her. I found her ... well, maybe it's better just to share the story, which seems a perfect fit for May Day. It begins, in cliched magazine story fashion, with a look around the town. In my defense, I was 26. It's long, so I'm dividing it into two parts, Part I today and Part II tomorrow.
     
     Alderson, W.V. is a pretty little town, cut in two by the wide, meandering Greenbrier River and shadowed by the gently rolling Appalachian mountains. About 1,100 people live here. It is the sort of town where one would expect to find a restaurant like Jim's Place, near the river, where $1.42 buys a huge slice of chocolate pie and coffee served in a cup with a biblical quotation on the side.
     Less expected is the Federal women's prison, just a bit up the road. It isn't the stereotypical prison found in movies—no cells, no guard towers, no bars, hardly any barbed wire. This is a low-security prison. The buildings are attractive, dorm-like, set facing a central square of large, stately trees. Inmates refer to their residences as "cottages.' Most visitors, trying to describe the prison, compare it to a college campus, and, indeed, the prison layout was based on the design of Bucknell University.
     But it is still a prison. The guards speak a para-military argot. To get in, visitors have to pass through a metal detector and have their possessions searched. The paperwork takes half an hour, and prison officials conduct themselves with a cold, detached air, like elementary schoolteachers unaccustomed to dealing with other adults.
     About 800 prisoners are at Alderson, for crimes ranging from murder to drug dealing to attempted assassination.
     One of the prisoner s is Jean T. Gump, a housewife from Morton Grove. She has been here since September 4, serving an eight-year sentence  for conspiracy and destruction of national defense property.
     Go to visit Gump and you will be shown to a cheery, little square parlor with yellow walls, green carpet and white wicker furniture. More than anything, it resembles the waiting room of a dentist's office.
     Gump is shown in, a short, compact woman, her dark brown hair flecked with grey. She wears a green army coat, blue pants, a blue sweatshirt and blue sneakers. Her glasses are squarish.
     Even at a low-security prison, one might expect a meeting with a convicted felon would be attended by a representative of the prison—but no. Gump insists that the room is bugged, a notion that seems a little preposterous at the time she says it, and more so after the 4 p.m. head count, when a frantic guard with a clipboard runs into the room. Far from listening in on Gump's conversation, they had forgotten where she was. With an ounce of guile, a visitor could have slipped Gump a pound of dynamite.
     The prisoners are trusted to behave at Alderson. During the day, the gates of the prison are open. In theory, any prisoner could talk out. They don't, and that is one reason they are at a prison as outwardly nice as Alderson.
     For Gump, the gates are open in more ways than one. The judge who sentenced her has the power to release her—and said that he would seriously consider doing so—if she would pay the United States government $424.48 and sign a paper promising not to commit any more crimes.
     She refuses. Refuses to pay the money. Refuses to sign the paper. Refuses to appeal her conviction.
     Why? Why would a woman swap her large colonial house on Linder Avenue in Morton Grove for a bare prison room? What would make a mother of 12, a grandmother of three, a former president of the Niles West High School P.T.A. and an active member of her church and many local organizations decide that the only course of action left to her is one that ends in a Federal prison? As Gump talks about her conviction, about her deeply held beliefs, the reasons, one by one, emerge.
     But we are getting ahead of ourselves. A good crime story should always begin with the crime.
     Just after dawn on March 28, 1986, three people walked solemnly through a farmer's field south of Pittsville, Mo. When they reached a chain-link fence surrounding the M10 Pittsville South Missile Minuteman II site, Ken Rippetoe, 23, of Rock Island, Ill., cut a square opening in the fence with a bolt cutter and climbed through the opening. 
     While woodpeckers twittered overhead and the active missile emitted a low, electric hum, Rippetoe took a sledge hammer and began pounding on the tracks next to the 1120-ton concrete silo cover. Larry Morlan, 26, of Davenport, Ia., and Gump, 58, hung a banner declaring "swords into Plowshares—An Act of Healing" on the fence, along with a photo montage of Gump's grandchildren. Then they too entered through the opening. Gump carried a baby bottle filled with a mixture of the trio's blood. She poured it on top of the silo, and then spray-painted the words "Disarm and Live" on the concrete.
     Outside the fence, filming the incident, were Mike Wallace and a crew from the CBS-TV program "60 Minutes." They had been tipped off—Gump says she doesn't know by whom—about the group's actions.
     There is an indication that the group, calling themselves "The Silo Plowshares," after the biblical prophecy, "They shall beat their swords into plowshares..." (Isaiah 2:4), didn't know that the film crew would be at the missile site. A news release issued that morning states that, after the break-in, the Plowshares "prayed and waited for military security to arrest them." 
    What actually happened was they sat in a circle and tried to pray, while Wallace shouted questions at them.
     "Doesn't the country need defense?" he said. "Our government would say that this proves that we are strong. Therefore, it would deter someone else from trying to attack us. They would call it an instrument of peace."
     "These are not peacekeepers," Gump responded. "The government only wants more power, more death capabilities. We're all hostages. I don't want to be that anymore. Enough is enough."
     As she spoke, she seemed angry, and pounded her fists on her knees.
     About 30 minutes later, an armored personnel carrier arrived and five soldiers, in full battle bear with automatic rifles, stepped out.
     "Attention all personnel," said a voice over a loudspeaker. "Please exit the site immediately with your hands up."
     Rippetoe, Morlan and Gump left the fenced-in area, their hands over their heads. The soldiers confiscated the film from the "60 Minutes" cameras, but it was eventually returned, becoming part of a Nov. 16 broadcast on Phillip and Daniel Berrigan, the radical clergymen who founded the Plowshares movement six years ago.
     The segment did not mention Gump by name, but referred to her as "a grandmother," a word that has been associated with Gump in the media as closely as if it were a title. It is a nice journalistic hook. Grandmothers are not the sort of people who are expected to go to prison committing acts of political protest.
     But it is misleading. While Gump does, in fact, have three grandchildren, she did not just roll out of bed one morning, bake cookies, then decide to break into a U.S. missile site and pour her blood over the silo hatch. it was along, gradual process that led her to Pittsville, Mo., last Good Friday. Perhaps it can best be viewed as a hardening process, one that began years ago out of a sincere desire to do good and has since calcified, so that today, nuclear disarmament is the sole focus of her social concern, and physical attacks on missile silos—"disarmament" in her terms—has become the sole valid way to work toward ending the peril of nuclear warfare.
     Wherever one stands on the nuclear issue, it is worthwhile to examine why Jean Gump has done what she has done. In an age of general apathy, where people routinely recognize something as a great and pressing problem and then are content to do nothing about it, it is interesting to find a woman who is willing to literally throw it all away—a comfortable life, the companionship of a large and loving family—for an issue such as the nuclear arms race, a reality most people unquestionably accept as a regrettable yet permanent part of our modern landscape.
     Jean Theresa Dalton was born May 24, 1927, in Oak Park. She traces the beginning of her political awareness to her courtship by Joe Gump, a salesman of German descent. They met at the close of World War II and, as their relationship developed, Jean Gump's family was concerned about the possibility of her marrying into a family that they had considered related to the enemy. An aunt worried aloud, "My God, is Jean going to marry a Hun?"
     "I checked out what that meant," says Gump. "At the time, we thought that maybe the Germans were an especially bad people. The government said they were. But I got to know my husband's family, and I came to the conclusion they were exactly like us and just allowed these atrocities to happen. it seemed to me that if these sensible, good people could sit back and allow the atrocities in that country, we could do it here, too. I made up my mind early in our marriage that I wasn't going to sit back. That was really why I got involved with the civil rights movement."
     In the 1950s, civil rights had not yet become a fashionable pastime for Morton Grove suburbanites. Joe Gump remembers the words "nigger love" painted on their garage, and Jean had certain friends who stopped talking to her once she began marching in protests. In the last 50's she joined the Christian Family Movement, and began traveling around the country for sit-ins and demonstrations. In March, 1965, she marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, facing the tear gas, nightsticks and whips of the Alabama state police.
     Back home she was elected to the executive board of the Niles Township Human Relations Council. As a member of the Niles West High School P.T.A. in the late 60's, Jean Gump often sided with students against teachers and administration concerning Vietnam War protests. She became involved in protests against handguns and for rights for the handicapped. On two occasions, she supplemented her already large family by taking refugee families from Vietnam into her home.
     Isabel Condit, 65, became friends with Gump during the 60's. She saw that in the 70's, with the end of the Vietnam War and the shift in emphasis of the civil rights movement, Gump turned her attention more and more to the threat of nuclear weaponry.
     "She and I thought we would start a movement for a nuclear freeze in Morton Grove in 1982," says Condit. "She set that as an aim for herself—something to accomplish—because she always does set herself concrete goals. That's one reasons she's successful." 
     Against, Gump went to marches, in San Francisco, Washington and New York. It was at a peace march in New York City in June 1984 that Jean met a young group of activists from Rock Island, Ill., who had started to question the utility of mere protest alone. They, like Gump, had become disillusioned by spectacles such as the New York march, where a million people gathered to make their voices heard for non-deployment of missile in Europe and accomplished absolutely nothing.
     In the years between her first grandchild's birth in 1982, and her arrest at the Pittsville missile site, Gump was arrested on four other occasions—the first time at Motorola's Schaumburg facility, protesting their manufacture of electronics for defense systems. She was arrested at Morton Thiokol's downtown headquarters, where she was part of a group that held a weekly prayer vigil for two and a half years at the doorstep of the arms contractor. her third arrest was at the Glenwood Ia., SAG base, following a retreat nearby, and then she was arrested again at Morton Thiokol.
     Getting arrested was never easy for Gump. "I was terrified," she says. "I had never broken a law. It was absolutely the most frightening thing I had ever done, and it doesn't get any easier."
     Gump is reluctant to give details about her trip to Missouri. At the trial, the prosecutor tried to get her to implicate other people in her actions, to name who had driven them to the site, where they had stayed, where they had gotten their tools. Gump, refusing to implicate anyone other than herself, spent seven days in the jail on a contempt of court citation. She now tends to become vague when talking about the actions leading up to her fifth arrest.
     She will say that she "did a lot of grieving" at home prior to her departure, going through her house, which she says she knew she would not see again, saying goodbye to everything. On Thursday, March 27, she wrote 19 letters to her 12 children, her relatives and friends, and asked a friend to mail them the next day. 
     "It was kind of a last will and testament," says Gump, remembering that she felt certain she would be shot at the test site by troops in helicopters.
    
Continued tomorrow. 

To read part II, click here.
     

Ford to stop making cars, mostly, though you’ll still call your SUV a ‘car’

Design for "Car a Deux Roues" 1870 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 

     Chicago does not think of itself as a city that makes cars. That would be Detroit. Or Belvidere.
     But it is. Chicago has been turning out automobiles for almost a century, at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant on Torrence Avenue.
     The plant began putting together Model Ts in 1924 and has been producing automobiles ever since, lately employing 5,000 workers in three shifts, running seven days a week, completing a shiny new vehicle about every minute.
     We were so pelted with news last week, between the Korean War abruptly ending and the various thrashings of the president, it was easy to overlook an event that would have been considered dramatic if the world weren’t churning so vigorously around it:
     Ford is going to stop making cars.
     For the most part.
     The company’s first quarter report, issued last Wednesday, contains a variety of news: revenue up 7 percent, the investor meeting will be Sept. 26.
     Then toward the bottom of the first page, Ford drops the bomb:
     “By 2020, almost 90 percent of the Ford portfolio in North America will be trucks, utilities and commercial vehicles. Given declining consumer demand and product profitability, the company will not invest in next generations of traditional Ford sedans for North America. Over the next few years, the Ford car portfolio on North America will transition to two vehicles — the best-selling Mustang and the all-new Focus Active crossover coming out next year.”

To continue reading, click here.

A Theory of Relativity

Shopper in Tokyo's Harajuku district, 2016

     Sometimes a story is incredible because it didn't actually happen. 

     The New Yorker has been famous for nearly a century for its high journalistic standards, particularly for its vaunted fact-checking department. But it dropped the ball with the story I share amazement over below, which turned out to be incredible because it was largely untrue.  You can read a 2021 Washington Post article about the fiasco here. 

     How did it happen? Maybe the oddness of Japan to Western eyes: the rent-a-family just seemed to fit in, and didn't require extraordinary diligence. Maybe journalism isn't designed to handle straight-out-deceit by numerous people. Maybe the New Yorker should have dug more. At least it doesn't seem an intentional deception on the part of the author or magazine, which is a comfort. 

     Anyway, I'm leaving this up as my own cautionary tale. I believed it occurred because the New Yorker said it was true. But they were wrong so I was wrong too. I regret the error.                                                                                                 1/22/2021

     As a writer, my task is to find interesting stuff and write about it, in the newspaper and here. It is not my job, generally, to bird dog the good writing of others and point you toward that instead. For two reasons.
     First, because I assume you can find enough to read on your own, without my direction. And second, that would make me kind of a eunuch at the orgy: standing idly by while others act, denied the pleasure of doing it myself.
     Who wants that?
      And yet. Sometimes a story is so extraordinary that ignoring it in order to present whatever little finger puppet display I've got going here feels wrong. That's like showing you a cat's cradle while a comet streaks overhead. Sometimes, you have to drop the string and point at the comet. 
     The opportunity doesn't arise too often, unfortunately. It's been well over three years since I played carnival barker to Patricia Marx's delicious send-up of comfort animals. So I don't think it's a bad thing for me to say today, in essence, stop reading here and instead rush to Elif Batuman's jaw-dropping Letter from Tokyo, A Theory of Relativity: Japan's rent-a-family industry, which would be incredible were it merely reporting what it is about: that in Japan you can hire people to pretend to be your mom or dad, sister or brother, son or daughter. This proves useful in all sorts of settings: a groom whose parents have died will hire an older couple to fool people at his wedding. A widower hires a woman to come to his house and make pancakes, and a surrogate daughter to laugh at his jokes and poke him in the ribs.
     It would be incredible enough just discovering the practice—I've visited Japan, twice, and my sister-in-law is Japanese and somehow I never heard of this.  My hunch is that most people are similarly unaware.
    But Batuman, a Turkish novelist, does something more difficult: she puts the practice into cultural context, and wonders why we find it ordinary to, oh, hire somebody to clean your house or give you a massage, but find the idea of hiring someone to pretend to be your mom almost repellent. 
      You might react differently, but by the time I finished the article, I found myself shifting from shock and near-revulsion to almost envying the practice, wishing I could hire myself a temporary father ("Neil, I know when you started your career as a writer, I shrugged it off as non-scientific failure, but now I'm proud of you, and what you've done...") or a couple of surrogate sons, ("Hey dad! Wanna play catch? Oh, and by the way, thanks for putting me through four years of college. That was nice of you.")
     It's a deeply strange, human and heartbreaking world, and the privilege of the writer to find it and present it on a platter. Enough throat-clearing from me for today. Go read Elif Batuman's piece in the New Yorker. 

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.