Night of 1,000 Jack-O-Lanterns

     "My wife is going to count how many pumpkins there actually are, and if they have fewer than 1,000, she's going to file a class action lawsuit," I said, to our friends as we entered the Chicago Botanic Gardens' "Night of 1,000 Jack-o-Lanterns." 
     Kinda lame, as far as wry remarks go. But I was a bit nervous—coming here was my idea, and I really didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. The Botanic Garden began this event in 2016, and it wasn't on my radar at all, even though we're members. but the bag of swag they gave me for judging the Spooky Pooch contest earlier this month not only contained a way cool Chicago Botanic Garden members' baseball cap (Sorry CARA Program, you've been displaced) but a quartet of tickets to this event, a $72 value. 
    So we asked some friends who had invited us to dinner whether they wanted to take a field trip afterward, and they gamely agreed.
    The smattering of small, regular-sized pumpkins soon gave way to ... what can I call them? Show pumpkins. Huge, intricately-carved pumpkins, dozens and dozens of them, lit from within and so skillfully done we wondered if lasers weren't involved—I decided that had to be impossible, given the uneven surface of the pumpkins.
    The ornately carved pumpkins were grouped thematically: first Dia del Muertos pumpkins, followed by "Botanimals," animals whose names were also parts of the names of plants, like the "Dandelion" at left. Classic movie monsters, even notable Chicago gargoyles. There were pumpkin carving experts showing off their art, and scattered food stands and bars.
     I was amazed at how mobbed the place was—the thing is sold out this year. Which might be disappointing, individually, but does carry some general good news: despite the grip of social media around our throats, lots of families will still turn out to ogle well-decorated pumpkins. 



     

Lee Bey’s plea for South Side architecture

   
     Lee Bey is a reporter.
     Yes, he wears other hats — architecture expert, urban planner, lecturer at the School of the Art Institute, photographer of growing renown.
     But a newspaperman is what he was when he joined the Sun-Times in 1992, and he remains true to the basic imperative of reporting: Tell people something they don’t already know.
     This educational process began, for me, with the very first photograph in his new book, “Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side.” (Northwestern University Press: $30). A simple, flat-faced building with a sloping roof. At first I thought it was some 1950s geometrical whimsy; the caption reveals it to be the Lavezzorio Community Center, 7600 S. Parnell Ave., designed in 2008 by Jeanne Gang — the most famous architect in Chicago today, whose Aqua Tower opened to raves in 2009. 

Lavezzorio Community Center

     

    ”It’s a fine little building that should have ridden Aqua Tower’s slipstream to some modest fame, at least,” Bey notes.
     That it didn’t — I had no idea Gang’s community center exists, and I pay attention to this kind of thing, or try to — is the point of Bey’s new book. Just as America still can’t seem to wrap its head around the fact that black lives carry the same weight as white ones, so Chicago’s architecture south of Cermak Road rarely shows up on our cultural radar, even though it should.

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Flashback 2000: Drugs damaged little Leanna from the start

     With the Chicago Teachers Union strike, I was looking at columns I've written over the years about the public schools, and noticed this column. It's the sort of thing that sticks in the mind. My mind anyway. Not only cradling little Leanna as a drug-damaged infant, but sitting in front of the television, half listening to a local news report about a 13-year-old girl dropping dead in front of her 7th grade classroom, snapping to attention when they mentioned her name.

    "That's my cocaine baby!" I shouted to my wife. I hate to make a sad story even sadder, but I realize now she would have been 33 years old had her mother not taken those drugs. I'd draw your attention to the reaction of the principal: It isn't easy teaching children, not if you do it right.


     Delores Dorsett smoked herself into labor on a crack cocaine binge. Doctors tried to stop it, but two days later, on Mother's Day, 1986, her daughter Leanna was born.
     Like many cocaine babies, Leanna was born with problems, the greatest being she was three months premature, and weighed 1 pound, 13 ounces. She lost several fingers from the umbilical cord wrapping tightly around them and cutting off the blood. She had a club foot. She was so damaged that doctors had to test her blood to determine she was a girl.
     I met Leanna and her mother that autumn. On Fridays, we would go together to Northwestern University's Perinatal Dependency Clinic. Delores Dorsett had an addict's openness. She would answer any question, and slowly it dawned on me that she had spent her life talking to officials, and I was now one of them.
     When I first saw Leanna, she was 3 months old and weighed 5 pounds, 6 ounces—underweight for a newborn. She was a shocking baby, with huge, desperate eyes that bored into you. While the terrible cocaine withdrawal at birth had passed, she was still jittery when you held her, writhing and crying and fussing, though her doctor wasn't sure if it was due to the cocaine or being born prematurely.
     Her mother was then 30 years old and had seven children. Leanna wasn't her only child harmed by cocaine. Nor did Leanna's birth end Delores' addiction. When Leanna came home from the hospital after nearly three months of intensive care, Delores prepared for the occasion by smoking crack.
     For more than a dozen years, I thought about Leanna Dorsett. Wondered what became of her. She was such a small spark of life, facing hard odds, right off the bat. Beaten up in the womb.
     My naive optimism told me that everything would be all right. I would wait a decent interval of years—and those years just snap by—until she was 18, or maybe even 21. And then I would swoop back into her life and find out.
     I truly believed, or hoped anyway, that she would be a college senior somewhere, bright, vivacious, the missing fingers the only hint that she had to battle her way into this unhappy world.
     Would it be fair of me, I often wondered, to present myself at all? This unexpected person, the observer, exploding into her life to tell her that her mother was a drug addict, that she had to be swaddled tightly to give her the sense of security that most babies have naturally but cocaine babies have lost, a balm to her shattered nerves?
     I pondered the matter from time to time. But really there was no rush. The years still stretched ahead. Maybe she would appreciate learning the truth. To have mysteries finally illuminated. Maybe she would resent it. Who could tell? I always believe that the truth helps. But what if your truth is an awful truth?
     That debate doesn't matter now. Leanna Dorsett collapsed and died last week in her classroom at Garrett Morgan Elementary School, where she was in the seventh grade.
     "She was a beautiful young lady," said her foster mother of six years, Claudette Winters. "She liked to dance. She liked music. She liked all her classes."
     She said the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services never told her that Leanna was a cocaine baby.
     "No, they didn't," Winters said.
     That's par for the course for DCFS. Sometimes they tell the parents. Sometimes they don't.
     "It would depend on the case," said Audrey Finkel, the deputy chief of communications for DCFS.
     Leanna's foster mother should have been told.
     "Absolutely," said Dr. Ira Chasnoff, who treated Leanna as a baby and is now president of Children's Research Triangle, an independent organization working with high risk and drug-exposed children. "Any family who is asked to foster or adopt a child needs to have a complete history. It has tremendous implications for the child's ongoing health and education. So even if the child is perfectly healthy, but having behavior problems, you can understand the behavior in context. So often we see children put on medication—Ritalin is an easy out—when what they need is a specific type of therapeutic approach to help manage their behaviors."
     The medical examiner's office said Friday that autopsy results are inconclusive. And while experts don't know that being a cocaine baby could cause a 13-year-old to die suddenly, it certainly might.  

Leanna Dorsett

     

     "We know early on that children exposed prenatally to cocaine have an increased rate of cardiac arrhythmias," Chasnoff said. "We've followed a bunch of children and found they have cleared up by 6 months of age. We have not found any of the children having them at an older age. But I think it's possible."
     Leanna Dorsett was buried Thursday. Her classmates and teachers remembered her not as someone who was dealt an unfair blow, but as a beautiful child whose inherent goodness managed to shine through adversity.
     "There's a lot of broken hearts at the school," said public schools CEO Paul Vallas. "The principal is a veteran, and she's distraught."
     The principal, Dr. Inez G. Walton, wept as she spoke of Leanna.
     "She was still a little wide-eyed girl, a very cordial child, well-mannered, well-dressed," Walton said. "She was a loving child, she tried to please. Everybody just really cared about her because of that. She had problems in terms of academics, because she was physically challenged. She had a lot of operations. But she was a child who would hug. She was just a joy to have in the school, truly a joy. I've lost children before, and all of it hurts. But not like this. This just shook everybody. The engineering staff. The people in the lunchroom. They loved her. This little girl touched everyone in that school like she was an angel on a mission and her mission was to touch people, and she did."
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 23, 2000

The Saturday snapshot: Leaves and snow.

     "Winter arrives abruptly in the Northwoods," regular reader Tony Galati wrote last week. "Thursday it was 67° up here. When I drove up Saturday, it was snowing."
     I wouldn't know—I usually go to the Northlands in September, to visit my buddy Rick's place in the UP, though looking at Tony's photos, taken around his cabin in Oneida County, Wisconsin, it made me consider, not for the first time, relocating in that vicinity permanently. I'd have to give up my job, of course, but I'm approaching that point, now still a spot on the horizon. A buck goes a long way up there.
     "It's 36 degrees," Tony writes. "Got a fire going, feet up, and an easy to read book. Retirement is a good thing."
     No doubt. In Canto 27, Dante has Guido da Montefeltro recount that, when he gave the false advice that consigned him to hell, he had come to that part of life when it is time to calar le vele e raccoglier le sarte — “lower the sails and coil the rope.”
    Sounds nice.
    "What a beautiful metaphor!" agrees 14th century Bolognese scholar Benvenuto da Imola, in his early commentary on The Inferno. "The mariner, who has been on a long voyage, must steer for a safe harbor where me may find rest."
    He's talking about eternal salvation, not Lake Superior. And that isn't the only view on the subject of how a man should grapple with age. There is of course Yeats, who cuts the other way. 
    "An aged man is but a paltry thing," he writes. "A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing."

    That sounds more my style. Clap hands as long as you can. Besides, I need the money.

     That is perhaps too weighty a reflection to hang on the delicate beauty of these photos. Plus I quoted those lines of Dante's in late August; repeating myself, another ominous sign. But these leaves should be the focus today. The words are just little black decorations to go beside them. Thanks Tony for sending these gorgeous pictures. 

Hope to miss class today? Guess again.

"The Watch" by Hebru Brantley

     Don’t be scared. The flat, floppy, beige thing that some adult just handed you is called a newspaper. It’s how people learned about stuff long ago, before phones. Don’t bother dragging your finger across the page—the text won’t change, and you’ll only smudge your fingertip.
     Fun fact: phones used to be called cell phones, because they communicate to a network of towers that cover hexagonal areas, or cells. The towers hand your signal off from one to the next as you move past, say, on your way to school, were you going to school. Though you may not go today because Chicago teachers and staff are on strike.      Welcome to the Chicago Sun-Times Virtual Schoolroom. I am Mr. Steinberg, and I’ll be your teacher for the next six minutes, or until you lose interest and wander off. Though if you stick here to the end, I will share the secret to writing well.
     And yes, writing well is something you will need to do someday. Not a column in a newspaper, God knows, but maybe an email to a potential employer or a love note to a special someone. If it’s poorly written, the job or heart you seek might go to someone else.
     First, a lesson in the value of school. We are going to conduct an exercise. I’d like you to pair off—you can enlist your brother or sister if nobody else is around, or the parent who handed you this newspaper (a compound word, formed by combining “news,” from the Latin nova, or “new” and “paper,” from the Latin papyrus).
     This is why kids hate school, isn’t it? All this irrelevant information. You don’t find it cool that the term we use today, paper, echoes back to ancient Egypt, papyrus, leaping across 2,000 years in a single breath? No? Not even a little bit?
    See, this is why teachers are always pushing for more. Teaching is hard. 

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Flashback 2012: Lessons from the last teachers strike

Unions join picketing teachers, Chicago, 1983

     With 30,000 members of the Chicago Teachers Union now officially on strike (though the mayor's press office is calling it a "work stoppage," because that sounds better, to them, I guess). This is the first time the CTU has struck in seven years, and I've been revisiting the columns I wrote in 2012. In this column, I try to put the strike in context of past strikes.

     So what does history tell us the city of Chicago and mayor Rahm Emanuel can expect now that the Chicago Teachers Union has gone on strike for the first time in 25 years?
     To set the stage: Ronald Reagan was president. Our school system was a national shame—the secretary of education, William Bennett, would soon deem the Chicago Public Schools the worst in the nation—"I'm not sure there's a system as bad as the Chicago system," are the words he actually used, noting that almost half of Chicago public school teachers sent their own children to private schools.
     The strike occurred Sept. 8, 1987, exactly 25 years ago, and would end up lasting 19 days, the longest ever.
     Teachers strikes weren't the rare occurrence back then that they are today—the 1987 strike was fourth since 1980, the ninth since 1970—teachers had walked out for 15 days in 1983, for 10 days in 1984. A high school senior in 1987 would have already lost nearly 10 full weeks of school due to strikes.
     The situation was similar around the country. It was a season of walkouts—20 other teachers strikes were going on in four states at the same time, though the collective students affected in those strikes, 260,000, didn't come close to the 435,000 student who attended CPS then, about 8 percent more than today.
     The length of the strike, following the recent past strikes, finally broke the patience of Chicago's parents. Parents rebelled—they organized their own huge demonstrations, formed "freedom schools," and demanded Mayor Harold Washington resolve the situation. That was probably the biggest impact of the strike, and something Emanuel ought to bear in mind. The city will only tolerate so much.
     When the 1987 strike occurred, negotiators weren't even close. Teachers were asking for a 10 percent raise the first year, a 5 percent the second. The district was offering what was effectively a 1.7 percent wage cut.
     Union president Jacqueline Vaughn called the board's proposal "unrealistic." The board used a stronger word.
     "I am tired of raping the system to satisfy the desires of employees," said finance chairman Clark Burrus.
     As the strike dragged on, student athletes missed games, college-bound seniors predicted they'd be packing for college while still attending high school, and everyone worried about baking in un-airconditioned classrooms, which they would.
     The strike was settled on Oct. 3. The teachers agreed to a 4 percent raise in the first year, with the second-year raise contingent on funding being found somewhere. Superintendent Manford Byrd said the agreement would mean the immediate layoff of 1700 teachers and staff. Funding for the bus system was cut so severely it had trouble getting kids to school, particularly as the school year stretched far into the summer.
     Washington immediately began organizing the groundwork that would lead to massive school reform, but his untimely death on Nov. 25 removed him from the scene, an escape from political consequences that will probably not be available to Emanuel.
     Within a year, Gov. Thompson had signed a school reform law that created local school councils that gave parents a much greater say in the operation of their school.
     The last day of school in Chicago was June 30, 1988, the latest the school year had ever gone. Students and teachers suffered alike. Teachers fell ill, or quit. At Yale Elementary, 7025 S. Princeton, at the end of one sweltering day two teachers announced they weren't coming back, and they didn't. Students quit too—one class that was supposed to have 35 had only 8, by the last week.
     Yet in some important ways, not much has changed.
     In 1987, 43 percent of incoming Chicago freshmen would drop out of high school without graduating. Today's drop-out rate is 39.4 percent, the lowest it has ever been.
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 10, 2012

‘One Day’ — ace writer spins gold from an ordinary Sunday

     What do you do when you’re the best, the very best, at what you do? When you’re a writer who has done the hard work, enjoyed a stellar career, received the plaudits — not one but two Pulitzer Prizes.
     Where do you go from there?
     You could forgive Gene Weingarten had he, at 68,, furled his sails in some snug harbor. After all, this is the man who talked star violinist Joshua Bell into standing at a Metro station in Washington, D.C., playing his priceless Stradivarius violin for tossed coins. A mere prank in the hands of a lesser journalist, Weingarten and his colleagues at the Washington Post turned it into a meditation on values, beauty, and how we spend our limited time on this earth. That earned his first Pulitzer.  

     He is also the guy who took a story most readers can’t flee quickly enough — kids dying in hot cars — and put their parents’ heartbreak on the page, earning his second Pulitzer.
     How do you top that?
     If you are Weingarten, who has a funny as well as a serious side, you find a challenge equal parts epic and implausible. You try to do something virtuosic. “A stunt, at its heart” as Weingarten himself admits. The journalistic version of a swan dive off a tall ladder into a teacup.
     ”I set myself a goal that I wasn’t sure I could hit,” Weingarten told me.
     He drew slips of paper out of a hat, selecting a random day between 1969 and 1989 — old enough to be a challenge, recent enough to provide living witnesses. That date was turned out to be Dec. 28, 1986. Then he dug into records, interviewed 500 people, worked six years and produced a riveting collection of stories pivoting on that date: “One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America” (Blue Rider: $28).

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