Ricketts not first owner to go to bat for Republicans

     So baseball fans are grumbling because Todd Ricketts, Cubs co-owner and finance chair of the Trump Victory Committee, is dandling GOP fundraisers at a party Saturday night in a little property of his called Wrigley Field.
     Reaction was swift and predictable. ”BOYCOTT THE CUBS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Jim McDonald demanded on Facebook. “Anyone who goes to Cubs games and spends money is actually supporting Trump. Who do you love more The Cubs or the future of the USA?”
     Oh please.   

     First off, the Ricketts family assumed controlling interest in the Cubs (it was too complicated a financial shell game to call it a “purchase”) in 2009. So the hefty profit off all those $10 beers have been funneling to right-wing causes for a decade. Odd that some notice only now, even claiming to shift their allegiance to the Sox, as if such a thing were possible.
     And remember from whom the Ricketts bought the Cubs: The Tribune Company. Not exactly Ben & Jerry’s. More like Fox News before the American Pravda was a gleam in Rupert Murdoch’s eye. Whether sneering at immigrants or urging isolation, the Trib was a foghorn of right-wing nuttery for decades, stretching back to the days when its owner, Col. Robert McCormick, began each morning licking the boots of Hitler.
     Yet fans still cheered Ryne Sandberg.

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Flashback 2011: Would so many still storm the beach today?

     On July 9, 1944, Corporal H. W. Crayton paused "somewhere in France" to write a letter to the parents of Raymond Hoback.
     "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Hoback," he began. "While walking along the beach D-Day plus 1, I came upon this Bible and as most any person would do I picked it up from the sand to keep it from being destroyed. I knew that most all Bibles have names and addresses within the cover so I made it my business to thumb through the pages until I came upon the name above. Knowing that you no doubt would want the book returned I am sending it knowing that most Bibles are a book to be cherished. I would have sent it sooner but I have been quite busy . . ."
     Knowing he had found a book but not its owner, Corp. Crayton put the best spin he could on the situation.
     "You have by now received a letter from your son saying he is well. I sincerely hope so. I imagine what has happened is that your son dropped the book without any notice. Most everybody who landed on the beach D-Day lost something. I for one as others did lost most of my personal belongings, so you see how easy it was to have dropped the book and not known about it. Everything was in such a turmoil . . ."
     His hope was in vain—by the time the Bible arrived, the Hobacks had been informed that both Raymond Hoback and his brother Bedford were killed at Omaha Beach, one of 33 pairs of brothers to die, along with more than 2,500 other Allied soldiers, on D-Day, June 6, 1944, 67 years ago today.
     The standard reason given to remember such sacrifice is to "honor" those soldiers, but given that they are beyond the touch of what we can do or say, I think it's more important that we remember the devotion to country and willingness to sacrifice they manifested, a sacrifice that, thankfully, has not been demanded of most Americans for a very long time—so long that it is a valid concern whether we'd be able to respond in a similar fashion if called upon to do so again. I like to think we would, but wonder if people could ever be as selfless as they were then.
     Bedford Hoback was named for the town he grew up in, Bedford, Va., and 17 of the 30 Bedford men in Company A, 116th Infantry, 29th Division also died that day. It wasn't an accident that they were in harm's way.
     "You know, us Bedford boys, we competed to be in the first wave," said Ray Nance, one of the few to return. "We wanted to be there. We wanted to be the first on the beach."
     Maybe we're smarter now. Maybe we see the futility of war, particularly the wars we're fighting today in Afghanistan, in Iraq, wars that are not so clear cut. They certainly won't end cleanly. There will be no fall of Berlin, no signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri to cease hostilities. We'll just at some point stop and bring the troops home, blundering blindly forward until then.
     Well, that isn't entirely true. As always, we have our history to guide us, a history that shows Americans have always been willing to sacrifice, to rise to the occasion, to defeat evil, to pay a high price, when called upon. We did not choose to enter World War II, the war came to us. I can't say the same about the present wars—the cause might be debatable, the heroism of the soldiers isn't.
     But sacrifice is supposed to be spread out. One of the many awful aspects of the current wars is that the full burden falls on such a small segment of the American population: the volunteer military and their families. The rest of us too easily ignore what's happening. Many people know that June 6, 1944 was D-Day. Can you cite one significant date in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars off the top of your head? I certainly can't.
     The sacrifice wasn't always spread out in the past either. Bedford suffered a greater rate of D-Day casualties than any other town in America. That is why Congress chose to locate the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, dedicated 10 years ago today. The monument depicts bronze figures storming a beach, with one representing Raymond Hoback—whose body was never found—face down in the sand, his Bible spilling out of his backpack.
     Cpl. Crayton ends his letter. "Time goes by so quickly as it has today. I must close hoping to hear that you received the Bible in good shape."
     His parents did. The Hoback brothers' sister, Lucille Boggess, still lives in Bedford, Va., and still cherishes Raymond's Bible.
     "You still think about them and miss them and just wonder," she told a local reporter a few days ago. "What would their life have been like if they had lived?''

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 6, 2011

City population grows by one

Frank Robert Schneider Sennett

     Congratulations to proud parents Denise Schneider and Frank Sennett, who welcomed baby boy Frank Robert Schneider Sennett on Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 3:54 a.m. Frankie weighed 6 pounds, 7 oz., and measured 20 inches long. All are doing well.
     And if you’re wondering what they’re doing at the top of the column, well, I originally intended to tag the happy news discreetly at the bottom. Why? Blame nostalgia. Not so long ago the paper boasted all sorts of bold-faced columns: Irv Kupcinet and Bill Zwecker, and of course Mike Sneed, who still runs on Sundays.
     There was a vigorous cosmopolitan swirl to those bold-faced columns. We weren’t a city of anonymous nobodies, hog-butchering and clock-watching unheralded and alone, but a glittering array of celebrities and quasi-celebrities and the connected powerful. Folks who counted. 

      Those days are gone, replaced by ... whatever the heck it is we have now. The top Chicago “influencer” is .... a 26-year-old make-up artist named Alexys Fleming, with 2.6 million followers on YouTube and 700,000 on Instagram. Not to take anything away from her. She seems good at what she does, and if the public is far, far, far more interested in learning how to transform into the Night King from Game of Thrones than in reading semi-witty critiques, the fault is not hers. (There’s actually more to Fleming than that; a diabetic, her ”Dumb Things People Say to Diabetics” video is funny and should be required viewing for anyone grappling with the ailment).
     But I digress. To tuck the news of little Frankie’s arrival at the bottom and let it sit there, to be honest, looked strange. And demanded explanation. And the more I explained, the longer it got and I realized that ... one of my favorite expressions when it comes to writing is a line from Napoleon: If you start to take Vienna, take Vienna. No half-measures, no shilly-shallying.
     So if we’re going to have a birth announcement, let’s do it up...

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Don't count those chickens quite yet.

      Boulder, Colorado is a liberal enclave if ever there were one, between the head-for-the-mountains University of Colorado, the swami spiritual Naropa Institute, and the geological layers of hikers and hippies-turned-techies and flush craft beer and herbal tea companies.. 
      The Boulder Book Store is perhaps the emotional epicenter of the town—not a single Ann Coulter best-seller in sight—and there I noticed this big display of oval stickers and rectangular magnets marking 01/20/21, "Trump's Last Day—Not soon enough!" 
       Pretty to think so.
       Maybe it is. 
       And maybe it isn't.
       My people have a term, a kina hora, which translates roughly as "evil eye." Not in the sense of placing a curse so much as knocking on wood. The idea roughly behind, "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched."
     Or, for those slow on the uptake: Trump might get re-elected. Then his last day would be 01/20/25. Not soon at all. That could happen. It's not only possible; it's probable—the president has an advantage, historically, and, say what you will, that asshole is president, and his herd of credulous dupe followers shows no sign of disillusionment.
     Recognizing the fact, that the deck is stacked against our country being delivered from the hands of its shame any time soon, is key to the Democrats' chances. Over-confidence was part of the galaxy of errors that led to Hillary Clinton's defeat. We should try not to reproduce her blunders, though this sticker, like so much going on right now, is not a cause for hope.
     I didn't buy one, but I got in line to buy some Belize chocolate. 
     "How long have you been selling those?" I asked the clerk, gesturing toward the display.
     "Since the beginning," she said, somewhat cryptically. 
     "I hope the date's correct," I observed. She didn't take the bait, but only looked at me, uncomprehendingly. 
    Trouble. 

Police forced to show courage legislators lack

     Virginia Beach is, to be honest, kind of a dump.
     “A tourist trap” is how I’ve described this unlovely coastal jumble of blockish ocean-facing hotels and pool-heavy motels, neon T-shirt and bicycle surrey rental stands, joints selling fried oysters and fish chowder, cramped stores hawking novelty shot glasses and Virginia is for Lovers beer cozies.
     We only visited because we were looking at southern colleges for the younger boy, and the grumpy dad doing all the driving insisted that he’d be damned if he was going to travel all the way from Chicago to the University of Richmond — lovely campus, great business school, they trust their kids with chunks of the endowment to invest, and the best mascot ever, the Spiders — without pushing 100 more miles and sticking his toes in the ocean for a few days.
     All things being equal, better to swim at Michigan City and save yourself a drive.
     There is, however, on the crowded and over-developed Virginia Beach boardwalk, a curious statue showing three figures, obscured up to their hips by a marble base, each with one hand interlocked, the other reaching down, as if offering passersby below a helping hand.
     It is the Virginia Beach Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. Dedicated in 2012, it’s inscribed with 14 names of local officers who died in the line of duty. The bronze larger-than-life figures represent the police, the sheriff’s office and federal agencies.
     I thought of the statue after what Virginia Beach police chief Jim Cervera called a “horrific event of unbelievable proportion” occurred Friday afternoon: a dozen people murdered at the Virginia Beach Municipal Center. Shot dead for ... well, whatever unknowable blend of petty grievance and flaring psychosis (and, never forget, easy access to automatic weaponry) causes a person to do such a thing.

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In new book, John Paul Stevens relates a lifetime of legal reasoning

John Paul Stevens in 2015

     I was engrossed when I heard former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens speak to the Chicago Bar Association four years ago. Reading his new book was less captivating, for reasons I try to summarize in the Sunday paper today. 

     Chicago doesn’t cherish local boy John Paul Stevens as much as it should. Maybe next year, when the former Supreme Court justice turns 100, he’ll get his due.
     Though now is not too early to kick off the celebration by reading his new book “The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years” (Little Brown, $35).
     An unfortunate subtitle — apparently the book was five years in the making, though you’d think in that time somebody at his publisher would have noticed that Stevens places the presidential election of Jimmy Carter in 1978, as opposed to 1976, the year that event took place in temporal reality.
     Not to start with a gaffe in a book that is, generally, an engaging if, by necessity, legalistic account of the key issues that frame our national conversation.
     Stevens is so long-lived, perhaps it can be forgiven if the years blur.
     He remembers going to the 1929 World Series at Wrigley Field and seeing Babe Ruth make his called shot in 1932. His father and grandfather built the Stevens Hotel — now the Hilton Chicago — and, as a boy, Stevens met Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. His first job was as a wandering raisin tart salesman at the 1933 Century of Progress Fair, the fourth star in the flag of Chicago.
     Stevens was invited to become a Navy cryptographer, spending World War II deciphering Japanese communications, then returned to Chicago to get his law degree at Northwestern.

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The Saturday Snapshot: Missouri justice

     Miscarriage of justice is nothing new in Missouri.
     After the state last week became the latest to enact an abortion ban—for all intents and purposes—denying half of American citizens the basic human right of enjoying sovereignty over their own bodies, faithful reader Tony Galati offered this timely contribution to the blog, these stunning photographs of the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, where the infamous Dred Scott case was first heard in 1847 and 1850 on its way for its infamous date with the United States Supreme Court.
     Scott was a slave, born in Virginia about 1799, taken to Missouri in 1830 with his owners, the Peter Blow family. He was sold to an army surgeon, Dr. John Emerson, who took him to the Illinois and Wisconsin territories, which were designated free by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
      Upon his return in 1842 to slave-owning Missouri, abolitionist friends encouraged Scott, who was illiterate, to petition the court, arguing that his time as a free man in the territories made him free permanently. 
     Scott's case was filed in the then-unfinished St. Louis courthouse on April 6, 1846. He lost the first trial on a technicality, but was allowed to petition again. The Missouri courts, in a bit of ominous foreshadowing for proponents of the latest law depriving Americans of liberty, sided with the notion of "once free, always free," and Scott won his freedom in this building in 1850. 
     But the case was appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court by the widow of the surgeon.
     The U.S. Supreme Court, to its undying shame, decided in 1857 that no black person could be a citizen of the United States, a ruling whose wrongness is echoed today in the notion that no woman can decide when she wants to have a baby. It took the Civil War to correct the court's error; who knows what national fissure will be required to put this question to rest? Future generations will no doubt view the current machinations—the dying gasp of compulsory religion in this country—with the same sense of sorrowful bafflement that Americans today view the Dred Scott case.
     Unless they don't. The side of justice always assumes it will win in the end but, if we look around at the world today, we can see that just isn't so.