The Joys of Summer #3: The Beach

  

  

New Jersey Beach, by William Trost Richards (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  
     This is an odd artifact, nearly 30 years old. And while it's a fairly flaccid piece of writing, it is interesting for its circumstance. 
     I hope.
     The summer of 1990 the Sun-Times was launching Sizzle, a magazine designed to appeal to young people. I was in my late 20s, so counted as a young person, or at least youngish, if you squinted, and so either volunteered or was asked to write something about the beach. I wrote the below despite that fact that a) I hate going to the beach and b) I almost never go. It's more of a fantasy than anything else, perhaps based on one hour of one afternoon with my pals shortly before graduating Northwestern. Of course the paper didn't publish it. To be honest, I feel a little squeamish posting it now; but then "squeamish" is a condition of life lately. I must have cared about it enough to print out a dot matrix version that has slept in a folder all this while. Vanity. But given the situation on the EGD medical front—I might get out of the hospital today, unless I don't—it's this or nothing. I hope I made the right choice.

    Ideally, you would never go to the beach. The beach would be there, outside your door, and you would wander onto it whenever the mood struck you, to think fine thoughts and watch the herons twirling over the shimmering sand.
     Having to go to the beach is more problematic. There is nothing intrinsically comfortable about a stretch of hot sand, never mind the usually long and difficult trek to get there.
     Comfort must be brought along, and comfort is chairs and coolers and towels and novels and umbrellas. Ice, bottles, food, utensils, sun block, shades and musical devices. Comfort is heavy.
    Which leads to the first and only each rule: Go with people. The thought of going alone might be enticing—you, silhouetted against the blue waters, a beacon of attractiveness and mystery.
    At the beach, alone, magnificent.
    But that isn't ever the case. Alone at the beach, you soon start to feel like something the waves washed up. A dead jellyfish. An old can. Nothing.
     A crowd makes you feel significant and, besides, you need people to help tote all the stuff. People to tell you that your shoulders are turning maroon. people to play Frisbee with and to hand you a cold beer when you don't feel like making the effort of reaching your hand all the way into the cooler.
   And that is the state you wish to attain on a beach. The laziest, sleepiest, most somnolent sort of near-coma you can possibly achieve.  Because you have spent so much energy lugging this stuff from the car, then setting up, and swimming and tossing the Frisbee and capering in the surf (another reason to go with a group. Have you ever seen somebody caper in the surf alone? They look like an idiot) you can then flop on the beach like an exhausted runner and rack up quality beach time.
    That is why we go to beaches in the first place.
     Where else can you wake up, all sleepy and disoriented, like a 4-year-old arising from nap time? You dig your watch out of .a sneaker. It's 4 p.m. You look around. Your friend are all scattered around like a pile of sleeping cats, their sand-crusted sides rising and falling in slumber.
    You fish in the melted ice and grab one of the remaining cold bottles. At the sound of the sloshing water, your friends start to stir and murmur. The sun is getting low. You think: evening. Dinner. Going out. First, a nice, cool , invigorating shower—maybe the best shower you ever had in your life, maybe with all your friends. Then dinner. Perhaps the best dinner you've ever eaten. The whole bunch of you, fresh and clean and wearing crisp new summer clothes, laughing together at your collective wit and mutual intelligence, heading into a wonderful restaurant after a day at the beach ,brown as beans and ready to party.
    That's what beaches do. they jumpstart your life. otherwise, why would people bother?

The Joys of Summer #2: Hot Dogs

     I love hot dogs—who doesn't?—and have written about the humble frank on a number of times over the years, whether attending Hot Dog University, or dipping into the ketchup controversy, alluded to yet again below. I somehow never shared this visit to the mothership itself, the Vienna Beef factory. Gold Coast is gone, alas, except for a tiny outpost tucked into a remote corner of Union Station. And Vienna Beef moved its factory to Bridgeport in 2016. No hot dogs, or solid foods of any type, for me at the moment—but I'll be looking forward to my next one, some time in August. Or September at the very latest.

     Another Fourth of July come and gone, and have you reflected on your deep personal debt to the humble hot dog? I thought not.
     Despite this being peak wienie season—nearly half of all hot dogs are consumed between Memorial Day and Labor Day—and despite Chicago being a world center for hot dogs, somehow the mild little sausages don't get proper credit, their significance ignored in their home town, drowned out in the choruses of praise for other Chicago standards, such as pizza.
     To add insult to injury, the only references I noticed to hot dogs over the holiday weekend were several reports on a hot dog eating contest—on New York's Coney Island, of all places, sponsored by Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs, whose franchise on Rush Street quickly withered and died in the face of superior local fare.
      "Chicago is a hot dog town," said Tom McGlade, a senior vice president at Vienna Beef, the largest of several frankmakers in the city. "We have 1,800 hot dog stands—more than the number of McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's combined."
     That gets overlooked, since none of those hot dog stands have the advertising clout of the burger giants. Most of Vienna's marketing goes into hot dog stand umbrellas and those eye-catching posters of giant hot dogs.
     There are many noteworthy stands, such as Gold Coast Hot Dogs on State Street, known for the tendency of visiting Hollywood stars to send their underlings to Gold Coast to fetch bags of chardogs back to their luxury suites.
     And Murphy's Red Hots on Belmont Avenue, whose owner, Bill Murphy, found himself tapped as the Col. Sanders of the Japanese hot dog after he stepped out from behind the counter to greet a group of Japanese customers at his stand. They turned out to be a team of food executives scouting the American hot dog scene before introducing the fare to the frankfurter-starved Japanese millions, and Murphy's friendliness earned him a goodwill trip to Japan.
     Despite the famous quote about how people who like legislation or sausages should never see either being made, I couldn't resist inviting myself over to Vienna's North Damen plant, where more than 100 million hot dogs a year are sent forth to gladden the hearts of a weary world.
     "Before I came to work here, I always thought hot dog makers were sweeping bugs off the floor, tossing in cow's noses and pig's toes," said McGlade, standing in front of a vat of 2,500 pounds of ground beef. "You can see how clean our beef is."
     Indeed. The meat looked as attractive as a ton and a quarter of ground meat could. Surround it with a hundred loaves' worth of toast points and a few dozen pounds of chopped egg, pop open a few jeroboams of champagne, and you could have the largest steak tartare party in the world.
     The beef arrives in big hunks from Vienna's own slaughterhouse in Harvard, Ill. I was taken aback when I saw a worker with a metal hook at the end of his arm use it to pull a chunk of meat toward him so he could trim off the fat with a big curved knife. The perils of industry, I thought.
     Then I noticed that all the other workers had hooks, too, and I quickly realized the hooks were held, not attached.
     A computer monitors the mixture to make sure it is 80 percent beef, 20 percent "sweet brisket trimmings"—a fancy way of saying "fat."
     Garlic, spices and salt are added and the mixture is pulverized until it ends up an unappetizing beige gel, which is then packed into casings.
     After the dogs are cooked, they turn the rich, enticing mahogany color people associate with beef franks.
     "No dyes," McGlade said. "It's a miracle." McGlade demonstrated that they are pre-cooked and don't need heating by plucking one off the line, snapping it in half, and taking a bite.
     Vienna takes credit for the invention of the famous Chicago Style Hot Dog, a frank buried under a mound of yellow mustard, neon green relish, chopped onion, tomato wedges, a pickle slice, hot peppers and a dash of celery salt.
     "It's a nice combination of sweet and crunchy and hot," said McGlade, who personally likes his dog with jardiniere and Grey Poupon mustard.
     You think that's odd? I like mine with mustard and ketchup, and eat them that way even though every person I've ever mentioned this to recoils in utter visceral disgust.
     I've come to accept ketchup on hot dogs as a perversion unique to myself, and will continue the practice until they pass a constitutional amendment banning it, and probably beyond.
     Then there is the entire question of charred vs. boiled.
     But that's an entirely different column. Hot dogs, thank God, are one area where consensus is not needed. You can enjoy your hot dog with whipped cream and a splash of Tabasco and it won't disturb me a bit. It's summertime. We should all relax.

                —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, July 9, 1997

The Joys of Summer #1: Ice cream

This is not the Jumbo Atomic Hot Fudge Sundae—that has three scoops—but the more modest Atomic Hot Fudge Sundae.

     Summer is a time of relaxation and the enjoyment of life's simple pleasures. To set aside quotidian concerns—our troubling political situation, the endless demands of work, complicated medical conditions that require surgery—and just have fun. 
    So for today, and the unforeseeable future, the blog, if not necessarily its author, will concern itself with the pleasures of summertime. For those who like to comment, it might be a number of days before I can sit up, read, vet and post them, and your patience as always is appreciated. I did think about just leaving the comments section open, but that's like handing my blog over to lunatics, and I'm not doing it.
     When I wrote the following, I had been home on paternity leave for seven months. This originally ran under the headline "Life, Treat Sweet at Margie's." For many years the Wicker Park institution kept a stack of photocopies next to the cash register, which pleased me greatly. It's still there, if you want to go, approaching its 100th year in business.

     I do not believe in angelic voices, interceding in our daily lives. Nevertheless, a voice did speak to me last week. It said, clearly, unmistakably, "Go to Margie's and get a sundae."
     To be honest, I had been feeling a little down. The routine had become very, well, routine. "Go to Margie's," the voice said. "And get a sundae."
    So I went. Driving down Western Avenue, I tried to remember how long it had been. At least six years. Maybe eight, since I last tasted that gorgeous bittersweet hot fudge sauce. And Margie, a tiny, ancient woman, sitting beside the cash register. Would she still be alive? Would the place even be open?
     Six years! Maybe eight. The Republicans are right. Our values ARE skewed. What could I have been doing all this time that was so important I couldn't go get a sundae? Shameful.
     From the outside, the place at 1960 N. Western is the same. Same 1940s sign. Same silk flowers and china dolls in the windows. The menu still offers 50 different ice cream sundaes, with names like the Zombie and the Astronaut and the Coco-Loco.
     The choice was easy. I ordered the Jumbo Fudge Atomic Sundae. Just placing the order was a joy: "I'll have the Jumbo Fudge Atomic Sundae, please," I said.
     Say it out loud once and you'll see what I mean.
     The Jumbo Fudge Atomic Sundae was exactly as it should be -- a white clamshell filled with three scoops of ice cream, covered by a lattice of hard chocolate dribbled over the top. (The lattice is what makes the sundae "atomic"). Whipped cream and chopped nuts on top of that. Plus a cherry. Plus two sugar cookies.
     Alongside, a stainless steel urn, filled with hot fudge sauce. Just as perfect as before—hot, rich, deep, dark, bittersweet.
     There was one difference, however. Margie Poulos was gone. She passed away just last year, at age 80. But Peter George Poulos, her son, was there, and he slipped into the booth and told me the Margie's story.
     His grandfather, also named Peter George Poulos, came to Chicago from Greece and, 75 years ago this year, opened an ice cream parlor at the exact spot where it stands today.
     The grandfather's son, George Peter Poulos—the current owner's father—met a girl named Margie Michaels.
     "They got engaged in that booth over there," says Poulos, pointing to a spot a few feet away. "We call it Lover's Lane."
     That was in 1933. Countless other couples have used the booth to pop the question. "You should be here on Valentine's Day—the joint is up for grabs," says Poulos.
     "People come back here to get engaged because their parents were engaged here."
     Poulos was born in 1936, and grew up, literally, in the store. "My father made up a cradle in the back of the candy case," he says.
     From the beginning, Margie's candy, the ice cream, the fudge sauce, was homemade, and nobody ever saw a reason to change it. "My mother was offered a fortune for the fudge recipe," he says.
     Fame has brushed against the little ice cream shop. Al Capone was a customer. The Beatles came by, after their Comiskey Park concert. Poulos, who is a podiatrist, was at a hospital doing his residency when his mother called.
     "She said, 'Hey, some English guys are here from Sox park,' " remembers Poulos. "I said, 'Ma, there's no English baseball team.' And she said, 'No, dummy. It's the Beatles.' "
     When Margie died, Poulos took over, moving his podiatry practice across the street, so he could better run the place. Lunchtime finds him there, along with his wife and their newborn son, named George Peter Poulos, after his granddad.
     "He loves the taste of ice cream," says Poulos, who gave the infant a fingerful of Margie's 18 percent butterfat frozen treasure when he was a week old.
     Might there be a chance that baby George will be running Margie's 75 years from now? Following in the footsteps of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents?
     "The little guy?" Poulos says, as if he never considered the question before. "I don't want him to be a foot doctor. I hope he will grow up here, like I did."
     Poulos thinks he has something good to pass along.
     "There are so few businesses that children want, because they see their parents work so hard, killing themselves," he says. "This is fun. You make people happy. It's not a tough life. You can walk around to your customers and say 'Hi' and be proud of what you're doing."
     I finished scraping the white clamshell clean with my spoon and made sure that not another iota of fudge could be dredged up out of the steel urn. Then I licked the spoon.
     I paid my bill -- the Jumbo Atomic Fudge Sundae cost $4; less than some places charge for a bottle of beer.
     I can't tell you how happy I felt leaving Margie's. Maybe it was enzymes from the fudge, working on my brain. Maybe it was the infectious cheer of Peter Poulos. Maybe it was the thought of baby George being groomed to make the secret fudge sauce for me when I am old and gray and will need it more than ever.
                 —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 5, 1996

Cleanslate preps workers for real world

 

     “Let’s get to work,” declares Tommy Wells, to no one in particular, loading empty garbage cans into a white pickup. “Make it a great day! Ladies and gentlemen. And it’s raining.”
     It sure is, a few minutes before 6 a.m., coming down hard. Some 60 men and women in identical baseball caps and gray vests trimmed with neon green gather in a large garage on South Ashland, waiting, snatches of conversation reflecting areas of the city that tourists never visit.
     “They wasted that boy — shot him in the face three times,”
     “This world just going crazy. It doesn’t matter where you go. In Chicago? It don’t matter where you go. Crime is everywhere.”     
     But not here. Here crime and homelessness, drug addiction and despondency are held at bay, thanks to the organization whose name is on those vests and hats: “Cleanslate” — operated by Cara, a social service program that since its founding in 1991 has paired more than 10,000 jobs with what it tactfully calls “individuals with high barriers to employment” — felons, recovering drug addicts, all manner of people taking their first tentative steps away from the street.
     The work is not elegant.
     “Mainly cleaning up sidewalks and curbs, some landscaping,” says Enise, 33. She’s worked a year for Cleanslate, which asks that workers’ last names not be used, so this first rung doesn’t hold them back higher up the ladder.

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Boffing bunnies

     It's summer, and I'm about to take a little time off. It seems my brain got a jump on things, so if you're looking for a significant topic deftly handled, well, check back tomorrow. Maybe you'll have better luck.
     Otherwise, when I was growing up, there was a shop in my hometown of Berea, Ohio called, aptly enough, "The Shoppe." It started off as what we called a "head shop," a small store where you could buy pot pipes and rolling papers and records and such. But soon it grew, and began offering clothes, and hip housewares. It's where, about 1979 I bought this pair of mugs to prepare the Quaker Apples and Cinnamon Instant Oatmeal I lived on as an undergraduate.
     This was the '70s, people were less tightly-wound about such things, and if you notice, not only is the bull anatomically correct, but the rabbits in the background are, well, doing what rabbits are famous for doing. A leporine Kama Sutra. I can't recall if I noticed this before or after buying the mugs. My guess is after. I came to think of it as the "boffing bunnies" mug, and appreciated both for the wide expanse of cobalt blue making up each creature, and particularly for the large size mugs. Perfect for tea.
       I looked closely at the steer mug and saw it's signed "1978 Win Ng-Taylor." In 1965, Spaulding Taylor and Win Ng formed a company called "Environmental Ceramics" in San Francisco, and came to be a quite popular purveyor of chic kitchen supplies, mugs and aprons, pot holders and dishtowels, in the 1970s and 1980s under the name Taylor & Ng. The company had a generally asian aesthetic, and also sold woks, if I recall, an exotic item at the time.
     The Shoppe is still in Berea and—why does this surprise me?—Taylor & Ng still operates online, where you can buy the exact same mugs, at the company's web site here, for $9.75.
      Of course you can. Though my mugs were made in Japan,and my guess is the new ones come from China. Still, they sell 'em. We live in a time where nothing, absolutely nothing, goes away. Whether that is a good or bad thing, well, you can discuss. So maybe a little significance after all, despite ourselves.

Girls too can be trustworthy, loyal, helpful ...

Felicia Pace, center, of Troop 64, marches in Northbrook’s Fourth of July parade. At left is Drew Sheedy.

     Victor Hugo never wrote, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
     What the author of “Les Miserables” and “Hunchback of Notre Dame” actually wrote, in French, was, “On résiste a l’invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas a l’invasion des idées.”
     Or, translated into English: “One can resist the invasion of armies but not the invasion of ideas.”
     Which not only doesn’t sound as good; it isn’t even true. One can resist ideas whose time has come. And millions do, for years, as they are dragged screaming and tweeting into the modern world.
     In fact, that might be handy shorthand for grasping what is going on today around the globe: some embrace ideas whose time has come. And some resist with all their might.
     Until change occurs, as change must, and most people ... shrug and move on.
     My wife and I took our folding chairs to Northbrook’s Fourth of July Parade last Thursday. A low-key affair. Cops on bikes. Fire trucks. Veterans marching as the crowd stood and clapped. The high school band. A division of the Shannon Rovers and the Jesse White Tumblers. Youth sports teams.
     And the Boy Scouts, whoops, Scouts BSA, which this year began permitting girls to make lanyards, learn how to pass axes safely and march in small town parades.

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If I call this a "blogburger," will I go to jail in Mississippi?

  

     Open your refrigerator. Take out the margarine. Look at the stick, or open the tub. What color is it? Yellow? Good, that means you're living in the year 2019.
     Because if you were living in 1919, your margarine might be white. By law. The powerful dairy industry having made it a crime to dye margarine yellow, under the strained notion that doing so perpetrated a fraud upon the American public who, perhaps unable to read the word "butter," might be confused by a product that looks like butter yet calls itself margarine. 

Confusing in Mississippi

     Margarine, a spread derived from beef fat and vegetable oil, is white—its name is from the Greek, margarite, for "pearl" ("Butter," a product dating to the start of history, also traces back to ancient Greek, from bous and turos, or "cow cheese.")
     Trying to get around the law, margarine was sometimes sold with a yellow dye. The consumer, the true victim here, was invited to mix them together. To avoid that, states passed laws requiring margarine be dyed pink. Or brown. Or black.
     This near-century long charade came to mind this week, as Mississippi tries claw the words "burger" and "hot dog" back from the grip of vegetarians, who would dupe easily-confused Mississippians with their veggie burgers and vegan hot dogs and such. Thus new laws, piling fines and jail time upon the soy fiends trying to pass their unwholesome discs of ordure off as "burgers." 
     Margarine was invented in France at the end of the 1860s and by the 1870s had come to the United States. Frightened dairy farmers did what fiercely proud capitalists often do when facing the challenge of a new, category-creating product—they went howling to law to forbid this unnatural spawn of the "ingenuity of depraved human genius." In 1886, Congress passed the Margarine Act, placing ruinous taxes and licensing fees on margarine. That was not enough for cow-happy Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania—their state legislatures banned margarine completely.  For the protection of the consumer.
     It didn't matter that butter was also dyed yellow. "This practice, however, butter makers argued, was simply a cosmetic tweak" according to the National Geographic, whose informative article on "The Butter Wars," is the source of many of the facts trotted out here.
     A total of 32 states passed laws banning yellow-dyed margarine. These lingered for decades; the last state to repeal theirs, Wisconsin of course, did not give up the fight until 1967.
     Lawmakers in Mississippi are no doubt ignorant of this history, as were those in Missouri, which passed a similar law, now thrashing through the courts. Nor do they realize that "burger" has no more traditionally been wed to "beef" than "pole" can only be used to describe a device used in fishing. 
     The non-meat meaning of "burger" goes back at least 80 years. Arnold Williams writes in American Speech, in April, 1939:

     To the proprietors and clientele of thousands of roadside inns, diners and eat-and-run lunch-counters, -burger has come to mean almost any meat or meat-substitute ground or chopped and, fried or grilled, made into sandwiches.

    He goes on to list chickenburger, clamburger, rabbitburger and nutburger among others. H.L Mencken's Supplement One of The American Language preserves pickleburger, tomatoburger and fishburger.
      My Wentworth and Flexner Dictionary of American Slang was published in 1975 contains such heresy as "shrimpburger," and "catfishburger." It says that the "-burger" suffix "means any hot sandwich served on a bun, often toasted, with many condiments." 

     It doesn't mention vegetarian burgers, but then such products were not as hot in the 1970s as they are now, which is why cattle farmers are trying to pass laws to undercut their sales. But Wentworth and Flexner leave the door open for their inclusion:

      "Special ingredients will affect the choice of a root word (Chineseburger, containing rice; Mexicanburger, containing chile)."

     Except where prohibited by law.