Flashback 1991: Room 174—a dead end

     An upcoming column required a call to the Cook County Medical Examiner Wednesday. I had a lovely conversation with someone from the county, and told her, in my chatty, effusive fashion, that nearly 30 years ago I spent the day with Dr. Robert Stein, the county's first medical examiner—before that, the post had been "coroner," a political office that rewarded connection over skill, and was filled more by men in derby hats than pathologists with medical degrees. I wanted to show her the article—a flaw of mine, I know, showing off my stuff, but too late to fix that now. I remember being proud about two aspects of this story: first, that I remarked upon the beauty of the young bodies in front of me. That didn't seem a place most reporters would go. And second, that I pointed out that most of them were African-American. At the time, it was considered impolite to do that. But to me, it was required. A problem can't be fixed if it can't be mentioned.
   
     They all end up here. All the clumsy drunks and the cocky felons; the innocent bystanders and the gangbangers who flash the wrong sign. Everyone who dies in the street, dies by the grim forms of violence, dies alone and unknown.
     Whatever the cause, they are brought to the same address: 2121 West Harrison St. They are brought through the same side entrance to the same room: Room 174. They are weighed on the same big stainless steel scale. A mop and an industrial wringer bucket always wait nearby.
     In this year of violence, when Chicago seems sure to top last year's total of 851 killings - the third highest in the city's history - and could very well break the all-time record of 970 murders, it is easy to fixate on numbers.
     But if you spend time in the Cook County Institute of Forensic Medicine and watch the dead come in, one at a time, the numbers recede. They are replaced by a realization of both the skewed racial mathematics of murder and the shocking fragility of the human body.
     Each evening, the next day's list is tallied. It usually contains between a dozen and two dozen names. The list appears on the desk of Dr. Robert J. Stein, Cook County's first and only medical examiner. For 15 years, he has left his home most days before 4 a.m. to arrive at work by 5 a.m. for a 12-hour day.
     He picks the cases he will handle, assigning the rest to the three forensic pathologists who work with him.
     Last year, 8,000 bodies passed through the medical examiner's office, which performed about 4,500 autopsies when cause of death was in doubt.
     On this particular day, there are 16 cases. Six are homicides. On average, eight times as many black people are murdered in Chicago as white; today, five of the six homicide victims are black. The sixth, a stabbing victim, is Hispanic. It is an average day.
     The rest are car accidents, mysterious deaths or possible homicides, requiring autopsies to determine cause of death.
     People mistakenly refer to the entire building as a "morgue," but in truth, the morgue is the big refrigerated storage area at the center of the building. It can be entered through several tall freezer doors.
     Contrary to popular belief, there are no drawers, no slabs. The bodies rest on gunmetal gray shelves. The shelves rise six high to the ceiling, and a forklift is needed to get them down from the top.
     Some bodies are wrapped in plastic shrouds, or white sheets, but the wrapping is haphazard. The only sound is the hum of refrigerator fans.
     The bodies are drenched in liquid soap, in bleach, but still the smell of death seeps through the rubber seals on refrigerator doors and soaks into clothes. Almost unbearable at first, after a minute it disappears, for a while, until it sneaks up again. It is an unforgettable smell.
     One morgue door leads into the autopsy room. The size of an elementary school classroom, the autopsy room has four stations where autopsies are performed simultaneously by Stein, Dr. Robert H. Kirschner, Dr. Mitra Kalelkar and Dr. Edmund R. Donoghue.
     At 8 a.m., there are more than a dozen people in the room. There are the four pathologists, each with an aide who does the bulk of the dirty work; several police officers, and a medical photographer, who takes pictures of the corpses and closeups of their wounds. Visiting interns from the University of Chicago and other schools, as well as doctors from South Africa and Japan, are also in the room.
     At each station is a corpse. The bodies are inclined on stainless steel tables, with fluids draining into large sinks.
     One body is that of a 22-year-old woman, shot by her boyfriend, who then killed himself. He is on a table nearby. On another table is a bicyclist; at the corner of 53rd and Princeton, he was shot seven times.
     The most unsettling thing about the bodies is that in many respects, they are beautiful - resembling sculpture, young and well-muscled, faces handsome and peaceful, beaded with water droplets from the beige hoses aides use to wash the gore into the sink.
     They look like they should be alive, and, of course, they should be. To gaze on those faces, unmarked, and those eyes, open, and then shift attention to the empty, red chest of the corpse is agonizing.
     Stein's case, No. 388, is a 25-year-old Mount Prospect man. He is dressed only in khaki shorts. On one arm is tattooed a dagger; on the other, a devil's face.
     There are no visible wounds. The only sign that he is not alive is his rigid pose; the deep, port-wine stains on his shoulders and the back of his neck, and his lower lip, which is deep blue.
     Mount Prospect Police Officer John Gross says the man was a drug dealer and user, that his roommates said they found him on the floor in his apartment.
     Cutting open a body is quick work. Stein's assistant, Doug Childress, takes a scalpel and, in two easy movements, makes incisions from armpit to armpit and from throat to navel. A few moments more and the man's heart is being weighed and examined.
     "This is the most important blood vessel in the body," says Stein, poking at the aorta. Lungs, liver, spleen follow. They are cut into slices, and samples are sent to a toxicology lab.
     The head is cut open with a small electric saw, its circular blade the size of a half dollar. "Guy's got a thick skull," says Childress. The skull is then opened with a small chrome wedge. The top of the skull makes a terrible sucking sound as it is removed. Stein weighs the brain and sections it.
     After about 45 minutes, Stein has uncovered nothing. All organs seem normal, and they are put into a plastic bag and returned to the chest cavity, which is crudely sewn up with heavy thread. The skull is packed with cotton.
      The next step is to wait for the lab report. Unlike on the television show "Quincy," which the 70-year-old Stein says is wrong on almost every detail, there are no rushes. The lab report will take up to two weeks. Until then, Stein fills out a temporary death certificate.
     The suburban man's body is returned to the morgue, and case No. 391 rolls into the autopsy room. On the new corpse's right big toe is wired a yellow tag that reads: "Unk. male black." He had been shot in the back at West 57th Place the day before.
     Despite the apparent cause of death, Stein still has to examine the body, murmuring details into a micro-recorder.
     The unknown man's clothes are cut away. A pair of black Air Jordans and a black baseball cap are set aside, near a bloody sponge. The corpse is tilted on its side, the body rigid, like a mannequin. The bullet hole is photographed beside a small ruler. The hole is one-third of an inch in diameter.
     The organs are examined. The bullet is found, lodged in a lung, along with a fragment. It looks small for the damage it has done.
     Stein pulls back a lung to display a pool of blood in the chest.
     "See that?" he says. "This man could have been saved if he was gotten to a hospital in time."
     At the next table, Harold Alexander, a technician for 20 years at the medical examiner's office, finishes sewing up one homicide victim. The body is rolled into the morgue and, 60 seconds later, another one is rolled out into the autopsy room.

     "I've been doing this so long," he says. "Every day. You get tired. You take so much–six days on, six days off. Sooner or later it catches up, the stress builds up. I've quit twice and come back twice."

     To summarize the bodies he handles, Alexander says: "Mostly black. Black male. Young male. Gang-related. Drug-related." In fact, 75 percent of the homicide victims in Chicago last year were black—639 black victims arriving at 2121 W. Harrison.
     Downstairs, near Room 174, Joseph Thomas is compiling the list of new arrivals.
     "We're going to hit the 1,000 homicide mark before year's end," says Thomas. "We're getting six or seven homicides a day. That's a lot of cases. It makes you so you don't want to go out for a drink after work."      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 10, 1991

A 5th star on Chicago’s flag: pep talk or curse?

  
     My people have a useful term that doesn’t translate well: kine hora. It’s Yiddish for “not the evil eye,” but means something akin to “knock on wood.” Were I to toss off some giddily optimistic prediction — “In September, when everything is back to normal, I’m looking forward to enjoying a sunny afternoon at Wrigley Field” — my wife might reply, “Don’t give yourself a kine hora.”
     Fate has a way of grinding our faces in misplaced optimism. My ballgame plans, come September, might haunt me as I’m herded into the temporary detention facility set up inside the shattered ruins of Wrigley, snagged in the federal sweep of writers and people who wear eyeglasses after July’s general societal collapse. I’ll look around, dazed, realizing I’m in the exact spot where I had anticipated an afternoon of peanuts and box scores.
     Best to avoid cheery predictions.
     So when Mayor Lori Lightfoot said, twice, she wants the city’s response to COVID-19 to be worthy of a new star on the Chicago flag, I winced, hope dwindling. Maybe this isn’t the beginning of the end. Maybe this is where the Bad Part starts.
     “I want nothing less than for our efforts over the coming months to truly warrant a fifth star on our flag,” Lightfoot said last week. Maybe she was being merely motivational, the way a Little League coach tells his players “I want every one of you to put in your best Hall-of-Fame effort against the Bumblebees.” That doesn’t mean he expects them to end up in Cooperstown.
     I hope so. Because to sincerely suggest a fifth star ... isn’t that jumping the gun? Isn’t plotting new flag stars an Ed Burke move? The defanged Burke argued a posteriori for a fifth star for the 2016 Olympics which, in case you forgot, didn’t work out so well.
     Fortunately, the solution was posed by the mayor herself, exactly one year ago. 

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Nurses: Tough, tender pros who love their jobs

     I typically write three columns a week, but often there are extras, such as this. I had done a number of interviews with nurses, and two weeks ago my bosses asked if I might do one more for International Nurses Day. I said sure—I try to be agreeable—and it ran last Tuesday.
     The dilemma for me was what to do with it here. Since it ran when I was on vacation, and I had already set up five days of Chicago Icon Week, and didn't want to break the continuity. I could have run it as a second daily post, but that seemed profligate. So I decided to save it until this week, thinking that few readers would care whether they were reading about a nurse on their actual day, and it would put some time between my previous nurse stories and this one. I'm a reader as well as a writer, and I feel as if I've been reading an awful lot of stories about medical personnel. Which is fitting, given the COVID-19 crisis, but also a reminder that it is better to offer too few than too many.

     Michelle Latona is no hero. She’s a nurse, in the emergency department at Mount Sinai Hospital.
     Latona certainly doesn’t consider herself heroic.
     “No, I don’t,” she said. “I wake up every morning and I come to work and do my job.”
     A job that demands she tend to the sick and the dying for 12 hours at a stretch. To juggle patients, rooms, medicines, doses, equipment, colleagues, hours, breaks, all the time keeping focused on the central task: making people well again.
     “We’ve been saving lives the entire time,” she said, admitting that since the COVID-19 pandemic hit Chicago in mid-March, things have changed.
     “This is a different time,” she said. “But I’ve continued to show up to work and do what I do.”
     Latona never knows what’s coming through the door.
     “This is a trauma center,” she said. “We still have gunshots, car accidents. Kids still fall off bunk beds. Now there are extra precautions. We have to go under the assumption that everyone is positive until they’ve proven negative. The COVID adds a little bit of extra stress.”
     That “little bit of extra stress” has to be heroic, the modesty of the truly courageous, since most folks feel extra stress going to the supermarket, never mind having to intubate COVID-19 patients in an ongoing worldwide crisis hitting nursing much harder than most professions.
     Nurses are the tip of the spear. The National Nurses Union reports at least 50 nurses have died in the United States from the coronavirus, and some 10,000 have been sickened by it. The only reason the death toll isn’t higher is because nurses tend to be younger, and fitter. Latona says her main hobby outside the hospital is working out.

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Mock death with American-made flatware

     Nobody is going to look back on the enormous toll of 2020 — the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the vanished jobs, the businesses that close and never re-open — and think, “What really stung was losing the Home + Housewares Show.”
     Most Chicagoans barely noticed when it was scrapped in early March. Heck, few notice when the show is held. Which is why I go. The Chicago Auto Show, a month before, draws the big media circus. I seldom go to that.
     Why? Cars are easy; sponge mops are hard. Six hours trudging past McCormick Place booths crammed with cutting boards and blenders, travel cups and bath mats, hand soap and slicers, and I’m in my groove. And, yes, there are celebrities: I once ran into Ron Popeil. We talked about his Veg-O-Matic.
     I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to read something that isn’t about the vaporous death that cannot be lied away.
     So, I hatched a plan: present my own little virtual Home + Housewares Show; call a few companies and try to find out what new kind of vegetable brush got lost in the general conflagration.
     That plan got as far as Matt Roberts and Greg Owens, co-owners of Liberty Tabletop.
     “Matt and I worked for Oneida,” Owens said. “We both worked for them, running the factory.”
     Oneida made silverware in Upstate New York for 125 years. But this was in the early 2000s, and China was beginning to not only eat our lunch but make the cutlery to do it.
     “In the early 1980s, China made no flatware,” Owens said. “What is a fork? Stainless steel shaped and polished. If you could buy metal subsidized by your government, you’re going to gobble up business. That’s what happened. Oneida could literally buy the finished product cheaper than they could buy stainless steel to make it.”
     More than a factory was imperiled. There was the town around it.
     “Sherrill, New York, is the smallest city in New York state,” Roberts said. “Twenty-five hundred inhabitants. The closest thing to Mayberry in existence. It was built by the Oneida community, begun in 1848. Very industrious. They’ve made flatware continuously since the 1870s.”
     Oneida closed its Sherrill factory on March 21, 2005. Roberts and Owens opened Sherrill Manufacturing March 22, 2005.
     At first, they focused on doing what the Chinese couldn’t. “Certain intricate patterns, they couldn’t figure out how to manufacture,” Owens said.

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Bulls Flashback 1985. "Chaplain has his own game plan"

    ESPN's documentary "The Last Dance," exploring Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, particularly the 1998 season, airs the last two of its 10 episodes tonight. To mark the occasion, I thought I'd reach waaaay back into the vault for the time I spoke with Michael Jordan.
    Of course, as you will see, the chat was a complete accident. First, the backstory: I was 24, and the opinion page editor of the Wheaton Daily Journal. But I was able to also write freelance for the Sun-Times through use of that important journalistic tool called Not Asking Permission. I had met Rev. Henry Soles one Sunday in his church, where fate had put me in a pew next to Cubs great Billy Williams. He gave testimony to the role of faith in his life. 
     I interviewed Rev. Soles for the Daily Journal, and after a standard profile question—do you have any hobbies?—was surprised to learn he was the chaplain to the Chicago Bulls. If you're wondering why I wrote that story for the Sun-Times and not for the paper that employed me, the answer is easy. My thinking was: the Journal is where I am, but the Sun-Times is where I am going.
     This was the first Bulls game I ever attended. I do have a few memories of talking to Jordan: first, that he was buck naked when I met him, sorting through letters before the game—Cubs tickets come to mind— handing certain ones to an assistant with instructions. Second, that when we began talking I had no idea who he was. I asked about chapel, he replied, and I was about to say, "And you are...?" when he pulled on his jersey. Well, I can read. I jotted the name in my notebook. 
    The Rev. Soles served as Bulls chaplain for 30 years, during all their championship seasons, and died in 2018.

     The game between the Bulls and the L.A. Clippers is 90 minutes away and inside the Chicago Stadium the action is still in the stands, not on the court. Vendors are hooking soft pretzels on rotating racks. Policemen are drinking coffee and watching the LuvaBulls practice a new routine.     
     The athletes begin to arrive. Forward David Greenwood is the first to enter Gate 3 1/2. A young fan approaches, pen and paper held out in a gesture that needs no words. Greenwood signs, and moved on. Orlando Woolridge does the same, pausing to smile at the fan.
     Henry Soles, tall enough to be a basketball player but, at 49, several years too old, follows through the gate. The fan does not ask for Soles' autograph. Yet soles is also a member of the Bulls, though few would recognize him. He is the team's chaplain, and has come to perform the service that precedes almost every NBA game.
     "Everybody respects the pastor," says Bulls star forward Michael Jordan. "With the stress and pressure athletes go through, it's good to have someone you can talk to, relax with someone to take the pressure off."
     Players from both teams attend the chapel, held in a small dressing room near the lockers. It is the only chance they have to meet, other than on the court.
     On this day, seven players show up. Five are Bulls: forwards Steve Johnson, Sidney Green and Greenwood, guard Wes Matthews and center Jawann Oldam. Two Clippers attend as well—Junior Bridgeman, who is president of the NBA Players Association and Harvey Catchings. It is an average turnout.
     Those who don't attend are distracted by other pre-game activities. Jordan is talking to reporters. Woodridge is having his feet taped by trainer Mark Pfeil.
     "I know I should be going," says Woodridge. "But I've been busy with a lot of injuries this year."
     Soles asks Catchings to open with a prayer. "Most gracious heavenly father," he begins, "we pray that you will be with us as we venture out onto the court..."
     Then Soles, perched on a table with a Bible in his hand, begins the lesson. His style is informal and conversational.
     "We'll be talking tonight about meeting challenges and goals," he says, looking from payer to player. He quotes a story from the Book of Numbers about Joshua, Caleb and the 12 spies who were intimidated by race of giants.
     "They were taler than Artis," says Soles, referring to the 7-foot-2 inch ex-Bull Artis Gilmore. "These were giant guys." The players, nodding occasionally in agreement, listen intently.
     Soles' message is brief. "We can meet any challenge that comes to us as long as we feel God's presence," he says.
     In 10 minutes, the lesson is over. Soles ends the service with a prayer , the athletes bowing their heads. Then they shake hands and head upstairs to the court for their warmups.
     "I don't give them a theological treatise wrapped in jargon," Soles said. "I give a simple, but hopefully inspiring message, from a biblical as well as a practical standpoint. We pray to do our best on the field, respect teammates and opponents, play up to potential and not suffer any serious injury."
     Soles' easy-going style and zealous service to his faith has won admiration from athletes across the country. Julius Erving can be counted on to bring six or seven teammates when the Philadelphia 76ers are in town. Famed Cubs left-fielder Billy Williams attends Soles' church in west suburban Wheaton and is a good friend.
     "The word is out all around the teams," said the Bulls' Greenwood. "I think everybody in the league has tremendous amounts of respect for him."
     In addition to chapel, Soles performs baptisms and counseling for the players and attends retreats and seminars with them.
     "I know Rev. Soles outside of what he's doing here," said the Clippers' Catchings, who has attended conferences of the Pro-Basketball Fellowship with Soles. "He has really enhanced my life. He's a great human being and I have always admired him."
     Last August, Soles led a group of athletes to Africa. The athletes, including Bobby Jones of the 76ers and Gilmore, now of the San Antonia Spus, did missionary work in Kenya and served as Christian witnesses to young people.
     They did this on their own times and it wasn't publicized, but they felt it was something they should do," said Soles.
     He began his sports ministry in 1975, providing chapel for the Bears and major league baseball teams at the request of ex-Navy quarterback Bruck Bickel, then director of the Chicago Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
     In 1979, he helped form Intersport Associates, a nonprofit organization that coordinates ministry activities aimed at professional athletes, and he added the Bulls to his roster in 1981.
     "Once inside I saw a great need for spiritual help on their part," he said. "They had the professional ability, they had the plaudits of the crowd, but they had a need for spiritual direction. I felt because of my background and ability I could help them."
     Soles also is an associate minister at the DuPage A.M.E. Church in Wheaton, as is his wife, Effie.
     His association with professional athletes gives Soles a down-to-earth view of his glamorous friends. he said that while many envy the athletes for their high salaries and exciting lifestyles, they are subject to great pressures. There are long separations from families, constant media exposure, the perils of excess and the demands of the sport.
     "I don't see them as stars. I see them as individuals who have needs," he said. "They have the normal problems for people their age—women, drugs, money—but the problems are intensified by the players' high visibility. Their temptations are greater.
     "Material things are not lasting, and I try to get the athletes to understand that," he said. "Life is short, especially the professional life of a sports player, and they must start planning for retirement the day they sign on.
     "We help them to put their career in perspective. We show them there are things more important than a sports career—their family, who has to suffer their absence, and most importantly, God Himself, who gave them the ability to excel."
     On this day, the Bulls excel, beating the Clippers 117-101. After the game, Soles stops by both locker rooms. Outside, the fans press and wave, clotted around the exit. After showering and dressing, the Bulls players leave the locker room, signing autographs as they walk briskly to their cars.
     "Rod Higgins! Rod Higgins!" a young man shouts to his companion. "I'm telling you, ROD HIGGINS!!"
     Henry Soles, unnoticed, tucks his Bible under his arm and disappears into the night.
   —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 3, 1985
   
   

Texas notes: Stolen car

     One of the best things about Caren Jeskey's Saturday reports from Austin, Texas is that I get to discover her along with you. In the third graph of her essay today, I paused and thought, "She has kind of a Chicago female Gautama Siddhartha thing going on." Which few can say.

     He dipped the big fat Philly blunt into the honey, lit it and took a long pull, his glassy sociopathic eyes fixed in my direction. I noticed their corners were turned up a bit in a menacing smile as he took a long pull. He’d brought a woman back with him after going out towards the Howard El for a nickel bag of weed. That’s all we could afford. I asked him why he brought her here, to the studio apartment off of Jonquil Terrace where we were crashing on a mattress in the closet of his 18 year old nephew’s studio apartment. I guess he was my boyfriend, this terrifying creature who was on the run from the law in Madison Wisconsin for a felony assault. The walk-in closet of a college student’s studio was the best housing situation we could line up. In response to my query he said “because she’s pretty. I wanted to look at her.” I was in my late twenties and she was younger than that and indeed very pretty. My blood ran ice cold and I wanted to scream and cry, to run out of there, but I was scared and hooked so I didn’t say a word. He passed her the blunt first, dead cold eyes smiling towards me, as if he was asking me to challenge him. I said nothing. She passed me the blunt and hot honey dripped onto my thigh, burning it and causing a scar. I barely flinched and inhaled the acrid smoke of weed mixed with a thick cigar leaf and held it in for as long as I could before slowly exhaling and finally sitting back. Now it didn’t matter who was there with us as I drifted into oblivion.
     This was just a typical Tuesday for me, and the next day I was back in school at the University of Chicago where I was working on a master’s degree. I’d show up in skin tight jeans I’d gotten at the sneaker store on 53rd Street and platform boots, my hair kinky and as big as Roseanne Roseannadanna’s, fresh out of the braids I’d slept in. I’d clomp around the Mies van der Rohe building where I was studying to be a champion for the disadvantaged, with a philosophy opposite of the great architect Mies who said “I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.” I fancied myself one of the strongest social justice advocates ever to have lived. No wonder I didn’t make a lot of friends that first year in grad school. I didn’t know how to work with others on a common goal — I was too guarded, I had too many secrets.
     Having been born in East Rogers Park where dozens of languages were and still are spoken laid the groundwork for me to realize this world is full of sheltered xenophobes and that I was not one of them. At a young age, through the wise and compassionate guidance of my very liberal folks, I decided that racism and injustice were intolerable. Since childhood I made it my mission to accept everyone, to be inclusive, and to help others fight for their own rights if I could. My folks called me their very own Statue of Liberty and once commented that growing up with me in the house felt like being in the UN with the diversity of friends I brought over.
     The powerful people and institutions in the world always seemed very crooked to me. People did not seem truly good. They were selfish and greedy and left others behind. I’d watch them stepping over homeless people and looking the other way as a person had a psychotic break or delusional episode on the city streets. I’d try to enjoy my privilege but often ended up feeling wrong about the safe and comfortable middle class life I was born into, so I constantly challenged it. I drank and smoked and found other escapes to avoid the deep pain and despair I felt inside. I had no idea that I was going about it all wrong and it took me years of trial and error to learn wiser ways. The answer, for me, to solving injustice or at least chipping away at it is actually living soberly. I do my best to bolster myself by surrounding myself with good people so that I can be a better cog in the wheel. Mentors ask me each night what I packed into the stream of life that day and I like to have something honest and good to share.
     In her song Stolen Car, Beth Orton sings “You said you'd stand for every known abuse that was ever threatened to anyone but you.” It’s easier to help others than reach inside and be honest about your own broken parts, but if we don’t do just that we cannot feel our collective humanity. I’ve heard it said that we learn about ourselves by studying others and I am dedicated to learning about my clients and other people I come across. It’s a means of salvation. If I can know them I am not rejecting this human experience and instead I feel a part of a larger organism. As Carl Jung said “compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.” I’ve only recently come out about my journey into sobriety and chose to do so since I see the value of authenticity. I’ve been taught that we are only as sick as our secrets. Perhaps my story will spark something in others and may even inspire them to get well themselves, or to reach out and help someone else who is suffering.
     As I continue on the path of ever-improving self care — eating healthy foods, resting well, daily meditation, support with my recovery, frequent long walks and bike rides, basking in nature, and finding joy and connection with others — the world keeps looking brighter. I have more energy and clarity to pitch in, in meaningful ways. I feel fortunate that I have this luxury to take care of myself and to reflect.
     I cannot shake the sense that resolving social inequity is partially my responsibility. There is gross injustice in mandating low end workers back to work while the privileged can afford to keep social distance during this pandemic but as we know, without money one does not have power or respect in this world we have created. Behaving this way is not necessary due to a dearth of resources, but has been created by those who hoard and enjoy their success as they step across the backs of others. I feel some solace when I focus on the sheer number of diverse representatives in this country who are now coming into positions of power. People whose ancestors have poured their sweat and tears into the literal fabric of our society might be downtrodden now but with the vast amount of voices ringing together they may finally rise up and be seen, heard and provided reparations. At least that’s the vision I hope to see come true. In 1909 Emma Goldman said “the history of the American kings of capital and authority is the history of repeated crimes, injustice, oppression, outrage, and abuse, all aiming at the suppression of individual liberties and the exploitation of the people.” We have always sacrificed the health and well being of our workers and other less privileged members of our society, but now how can we continue to look the other way? We cannot be cruel enough to continue to send them out into this pandemic world, can we? Emma Goldman was planting a seed that we must continue to sow together.

 

Chicago Icon #5: Charles Percy

      Well, this is fortuitous. Monday's icon, Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, led to his secretary and love, Mickey Curtin, on Tuesday, then Wednesday and Thursday's, a two-parter on the man who introduced us, Art Petacque. I was already planning to highlight someone from Art's Pulitzer Prize winning story, Sen. Charles Percy, and so was pleased to see a lively discussion in the comments section on aspects of his life, including the calumny that led to his senate defeat—that he was anti-Semitic, based on a sensible suggestion that Israel would have done well to follow—continuing unabated after 45 years.

     There is one oversight that leapt out when I reread this 2011 obit: I never say what Bell & Howell was: a manufacturer of movie cameras and projectors (today it is ... well, heck, here's the web site. "Innovative Services & Solutions." YOU try to figure it out what that means).

     Charles H. Percy, the wonder boy from Illinois, president of Bell & Howell at 29, a United States senator at 47, and for four years chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, died early Saturday in Washington, D.C.
    He was 91 and had struggled with Alzheimer's disease in recent years.
    Percy won his seat in 1966, less than two months after the brutal murder of his daughter Valerie, a crime that shocked Chicago and the nation. The murderer was never caught, and to this day the case is often the first thing Chicagoans think of when remembering Percy, despite his many accomplishments.
    He might have been president. Upon taking office, the dapper, handsome Percy immediately was pegged as presidential timber, one of the "New Breed'' Republicans, by a GOP eager to move beyond the disastrous Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964. He was on the cover of Time magazine, and no less a figure than Dwight D. Eisenhower predicted he would be president.
     But it was perilous to be both an outspoken liberal and a Republican, and Percy's presidential hopes were thwarted by more conservative Republicans such as Richard Nixon.
     Percy also was hobbled, paradoxically, by his honesty, energy and ambition, traits that some viewed as character flaws.
     "He seemed to be a whirlwind of self-promotion, obsessed with public relations,'' George Will wrote in 1974. "He seemed to be a blend of two disagreeable and until then unblendable character traits: cynicism and naivete.''
     Charles Harting Percy was born on Sept. 27, 1919, in Pensacola, Fla. His parents, Edward and Elizabeth Harting Percy, were devout Christian Scientists. The family moved to Chicago in early 1920.
     Percy grew up in Rogers Park and Wilmette. He was, by all accounts, a driven youth. His first job at age 5 was selling magazines, and he did it so well that, at age 7, he got his first public recognition—a year's membership to the YMCA for selling more subscriptions than anybody else.
    His father, a banker, was laid off in the Depression, and the family went on relief. Young Charles sold his mother's homemade sand tart cookies on the street to help out. His Sunday school teacher Joseph H. McNabb, the president of Bell & Howell, encouraged him to enter into a Bell & Howell cooperative training program. In 1936 he did, while studying at the University of Chicago.
     At college, Percy was a Big Man on Campus. He was president of his fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi, captain of the university's championship water polo team and marshal to university President Robert Maynard Hutchins, the highest honor the school could give.
     He displayed considerable business savvy. He formed a cooperative to save money by pooling fraternity purchases and buying in bulk. By the time he graduated, in 1941, his co-op was grossing $150,000 a year. Hutchins called him "the richest boy who ever worked his way through college."
     After graduation, Percy joined Bell & Howell full time. At 23, he was elected to the board of directors. In February, 1943, he took a leave to join the Navy.
     Percy married Jeanne Dickerson in 1943, and they had a son, Roger, and twin daughters, Valerie and Sharon. His wife died during surgery in 1947. He married Loraine Guyer in 1950. They had a daughter, Gail, and a son, Mark.
     He returned to Bell & Howell after the war to lead industrial relations and foreign manufacturing programs.
     Following the death of McNabb in 1949, Percy was named Bell & Howell president and chief executive officer—at 29, the youngest person to head a major American corporation up to that time. Under his leadership over 14 years, annual sales climbed from $13 million to $160 million.
     He entered politics as a Republican precinct captain in 1946, organizing returning vets in Kenilworth. As he rose in business, he was taken under the wing of Eisenhower.
     "Gen. Eisenhower was the controlling influence that caused me to come into public life," Percy said in an interview for the Eisenhower Library. "He was the only man who could have caused me to seek elective office."
     In 1955, Percy was elected president of the United Republican Fund of Illinois, having raised $4 million for the party in four years.
     In 1956, Eisenhower named him as special ambassador to represent the United States at presidential inaugurations in Peru and Bolivia.
     As a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1964, Percy supported Goldwater. That year, Percy ran for governor against Otto Kerner and was narrowly defeated.
     In 1966, he ran for the Senate against incumbent Paul Douglas.
     On Sept. 18, 1966, his daughter Valerie, 21, was murdered in her bed at the family's 17-room mansion in Kenilworth. The crime was never solved.
     Because of the crime, both candidates declared a halt to campaigning, resuming in mid-October.
     Percy rolled over Douglas, 74, by nearly half a million votes. Some observers felt a certain amount of "sympathy vote" was a factor.
     Nevertheless, "the whiz kid of the 90th Congress" and "the wonder boy from Illinois" quickly made a name for himself, speaking out on a range of issues. Attention immediately centered on him as a presidential hope for the battered Republican Party.
     "Sen. Percy says he isn't running for president, but he's walking awfully fast," began a news story in September, 1967.
     Percy was an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam, which he visited in 1967. During a tour of the Dak Son refugee camp near the Cambodian border, his party came under mortar and rifle attack and had to be rescued by U.S. helicopter gunships.
     "I never got lower to the ground in my life," Percy later said.
     Percy did not abate his criticisms of the war when it ceased being Lyndon Johnson's war and became Richard Nixon's war.
     "Is it worth tearing ourselves apart inside and spending a half billion dollars a week?" he asked in 1969. "I say it's not worth it."
      Nixon disagreed, and he placed his fellow Republican on his infamous Enemies List.
      In 1970, Percy joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he chaired for his last four years in office. The same year, Percy persuaded Nixon to give future Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens a spot on the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit—Percy was known for having an excellent eye for judicial talent.
     In 1972, Percy won re-election by more than a million votes.
     The biggest controversy of his second term came when Percy, the State of Israel Bonds Committee's 1970 Man of the Year, made a visit to the Middle East in 1975 and called on Israel to "take some risks for peace" by negotiating with Yasser Arafat and withdrawing to its 1967 borders. Pro-Israel groups never forgave Percy — though, ironically, his suggestions were embraced in subsequent peace efforts.
     He was elected to a third term in 1978, but in 1984, his image was tarred in a bitter Republican primary, and he was defeated in the fall by Democrat Paul Simon.
     After leaving the Senate, Percy said his proudest accomplishment in office had been pushing for more opportunity for women in the federal government.
     Leaving elective politics, Percy formed a company that worked on behalf of American firms conducting business abroad.
     He remained an active figure on the Washington, D.C., scene, not only as a former senator and a consultant, but as the father-in-law of Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the husband of his surviving twin daughter, Sharon.
     After 1995, he began developing symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, though he remained an eager participant in his family and civic interests until recent years.
     A section of Georgetown Park along the Potamac River was named in his honor in 2008, and the University of California, Berkeley named a scholarship program for Percy.
     The family will hold a private service.          

    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 18, 2011