Flashback 2010: Palmer House marks 140th

Palmer House general manager Dean Lane speaks at a Palmer House event

     Friends on Facebook are mourning the Palmer House, a bit prematurely, I believe. Yes, the venerable Chicago hotel has been closed since mid-March, but there's a lot of that going around. Yes, its owners are being sued by creditors who claim it has defaulted on $333.2 million in mortgage payments, which is a lot. 

     But it isn't as if anybody is taking a wrecking ball to the place. Not yet anyway. The Palmer House has seen a lot of ups and downs: a Great Depression, a Great Recession, two World Wars and any number of plagues and panics. Remember, this is the third version—the first burned to the ground two weeks after it opened, in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. I like to think the current Palmer House will survive the current conflagration too.

      When I think of the Palmer House, I thought, not so much of the enormous, ornate rectangular box of a lobby, with its lush ceiling. Nor of its elegant restaurant, Lockwood, or the way-cool Mertz pharmacy. Nor stores of the past—there used to be a Church's shoes at the Palmer House, a Pendleton store. 

     No, I think of the people, the proud, longtime Palmer House workers I've met over the years, and spotlight in the 2010 column. Four out of 10 hotel employees are out-of-work, and I hope they know that they are being thought of with gratitude and hope that they'll be back, doing what they love to do, very soon, when the world finally wakes up from this endless nightmare.

    This column is in two parts, and I left on the second part, a riff on Restoration Hardware, for those who have time to kill today.  

     Luxury is in the details. It requires a certain genius, like an artist adding dabs of color to a canvas. Arriving at the ceremony marking the 140th anniversary of the Palmer House Hilton, I admired the gold and maroon bunting draped over the facade for the occasion—a nice touch.

     Of course they'd mix in Mayor Daley. Bill Kurtis as host is another easy call. And yes, add "Chicago" played by the Carl Sandburg High School Marching Band.
     Owner Joe Sitt offered a classic success story: How he started out with a dress shop in the Palmer House and ended up owning one of America's great hotels.
     General manager Dean Lane outlined historical highlights: presidents from Garfield to Obama and a fancy dinner for Ulysses S. Grant with master of ceremonies duties performed by Mark Twain.
     But that isn't what charmed me. What really charmed me—and I knew right away this was the handiwork of Ken Price, the Palmer House's longtime PR director, a Picasso at this kind of thing—were the three dozen hotel employees lined up on stage behind the dignitaries: chefs in their white toques, doormen with peaked caps and gold epaulets, electricians with their names embroidered on patches, maids and busboys, desk clerks and painters, bellmen and janitors. They had to stand there a while, waiting for the ceremony to start. Their expressions never wavered from beaming, bursting pride.
     Afterward, the staff scattered to go back to cooking and cleaning and carrying and computer-tapping. But I caught up with a man wearing an embroidered nametag with "Bill V.—Locksmith" on it.
     "I'm very proud," said Bill Vollmer, who has worked at the Palmer House for 31 years. "It's a terrific place to work, a lot of good and kind people to work for and with. To take care of the guests who come here—it's the difference between working at a job and having a career."
     Vollmer said his father, Augie, worked for the Palmer House as a carpenter.
     "I was just a little kid, but I remember coming downtown to pick him up from work," he said.
     By then we were near the lobby. People crowded around the huge cake shaped like the hotel. I did what I did the first day I arrived in Chicago at age 15: I dropped my head back and gazed in wonder at the Wedgewood ceiling. In a world of constant change, some things stay the same.

RESTORATION HARDWARE: PART TWO

     You enter the cave, the flashlight beam falls upon the glittering treasure, and the tendency is to fall to your knees and begin scooping rubies and gold doubloons into your pockets with both hands.
     The idea of stopping, standing up and pushing on to see what the caverns beyond might hold doesn't cross your mind.
     Thus Wednesday, when I shared the fortune in sun-bleached pomposity harvested from the Restoration Hardware store and catalog, my central challenge was cramming all the bounty to fit into limited space. I never considered something readers leapt to point out.
     "I went to their website," wrote Doug Criner. "If anything, you understated the situation."
     Jason Moran drew attention to Item 40400524 and sent me a link, and I must admit, when I clicked on it, I was sure this had to be parody. This couldn't be real.
     The item, "Handwoven Rope—$89," and to the right, a coil sitting on a table.
     "The humble rope," the catalog copy begins. "Both utilitarian and artistic in its own right—dates back to antiquity and the ancient Egyptians."
     So does snot, but let's keep going.
     "Our hand-twisted, 2"-thick jute rope makes a simple, textural statement, whether hanging in a coil or unfurled over a mantel."
     And what kind of simple statement would that be? I believe it is a bold declaration of: I paid 90 bucks for a length of rope. Not only that, a length of rope that I can't even use. For there, in small print, "For decorative use only."
     Here, though, I want to change course a bit. Because the Restoration Hardware rope, well, it looks like a really nice rope. I do understand decorative objects. In my office at home, there's my dad's Vibroplex telegraph key. An old globe with lion's paw feet. A Haitian rum bottle, covered in black sequins, with a skull and crossbones in silver sequins. Three busts of Dante.
     But these are items from MY life, not something expensively purchased and set out to suggest a life I might have led.
     Yes, beautiful things can cost money. Mounted on the office wall is an antique catcher's mitt—it wasn't my catcher's mitt, but from the 1940s, big and round and perfect, the color of caramel. I was trolling eBay for catcher's mitts for my son, and saw this, and thought it would look great and for $25, why not?
     Is there a big difference between $25 for a catcher's mitt you don't use and $89 for some rope you can't use? I don't know.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 17, 2010

Flashback 2011: Those in want out, those out want in

  

     Have you ever gone to visit a relative in the Cook County Jail?
     I have. It isn't easy.
     It wasn't MY relative, I should rush to add, but a reader's, who invited me along. I went because I tend to go where I'm asked.
     I'm on vacation this week, taking a break from work at the paper to work on the next book. If you're at the Newberry Library today and you see someone who looks like me, drift over and say hello. Quietly. 
    
     Every Thursday since the arrest of his son July 30, Neal Tarshis rolls his wheelchair to a bus stop to begin a trek to Cook County Jail.
     "I see him as much as they let me," says Tarshis, over the rumble of the #93 bus. "I want him to know someone cares."
     Tarshis, 63, in a wheelchair because of severe arthritis, lives in Astoria Place, a nursing home at 6300 N. California. It is a two-hour, four-bus commute—the #93 to the #82 to the #126 to the #94—to get to the jail at 3000 S. California. Once, he says, he made the trip only to find he couldn't get in to see his son.
     "I went with Neal," said a friend. "They changed visiting hours without notice. They didn't treat him nice. It was a nightmare."
     Tarshis wrote to me to complain, and since I couldn't go back in time and observe how he was handled or mishandled at the jail, the thing to do was to go with him and watch.
     Some 11,000 prisoners live at the jail, giving it the population of Edison Park. The mayor of the jail, so to speak, is Sheriff Tom Dart, and if you expect him to be defensive about mistreated visitors, you'd be wrong.
     "I detest apologists rationalizing bad behavior," Dart said. "Sometimes there's elements of truth in both sides. There are times when I scratch my head why we're not treating someone with more respect who comes to visit." Dart sympathizes with the 1,000 or so daily visitors, who must pass through tight security for their 15-minute visit.
     "These are decent people and we're not treating them with a red carpet," the sheriff said. "They've gone through hell enough as it is, lives turned upside down by a grandson or a nephew. These are grandparents coming in, aunts and uncles. They've done nothing wrong. How does it work for our office to treat people like trash?"
     But he also sympathizes with his officers.
     "Objectively, I challenge someone to find a more difficult job than being a correctional officer," he said. "It's a very, very difficult job. Can the public be unreasonable? Yes. Can the correctional officer? Yes. But we've tried to be much more customer-friendly."
     Two hours is a long time on buses, and Tarshis reminisces about his son, a Navy vet.
     "I have so many memories of when he was little," said Tarshis. "He was very intelligent, very responsible. He got A's in all his subjects. He's not a bad child, he's sweet."
     His son, 36, has too many problems to summarize here. Suffice it to say this is his third time in jail, not for a grave crime—he didn't kill anybody—and I'm not using his name to make it easier if he pulls himself together.
     Tarshis and I join a long line outside the tall concertina wire-topped fence around the jail. The guards take us five at a time, ordering us to have our IDs ready, reminding us that we cannot bring in cell phones or pens.
     Once, visitors were told to bury their contraband in the bushes outside. Now Dart has been installing vending machine lockers.
     We go through metal detectors and are frisked by guards; their manner is severe but not rude and I get the impression that so long as you immediately do exactly what they say it goes smoothly, but that any hesitation or resistance might invite rougher treatment.
      We give our names, wait more, then are ushered into a long room, 15 at a time, with stools bolted to the floor. Fifteen prisoners in sand-colored jail garb emerge on the other side of the Plexiglas. It's loud and hard to hear. The jail used to use phones, but those were destroyed by angry inmates and visitors. Now there is a round red metal plate, the holes staggered to keep drinking straws filled with cocaine from being pushed through.
     His son, gaunt, his head closely sheared, is all jangly intensity—I expected to watch him and his dad talk, but he wants to talk to me, a compressed stream of complaint and indignation about the jail. Next to us, a mother puts a toddler on the counter and the girl presses her hands flat against the glass.
     That's another issue Dart grapples with—there can be a child at one spot, a profanity-laced tirade at the next, and a woman holding up her shirt to flash her breasts at a third.
     "There are loads of kids there," said Dart, proud father of five kids. "And a strong part of me says that's not a good environment for any child. I don't want kids seeing this stuff. The other side is, if they're connecting with their father, that's a good thing, too. We can't do it any other way because we have so many visitors, so many prisoners. You want to make it better. I'm struggling how to pull that off."
     Dart would like remote video visits, to save families the trip, but "there's no money."
     The next court date for Neal Tarshis's son is Nov. 2, which means one thing. "I get to make four more visits," he said.
     —Originally published in the SunTimes, Oct. 9, 2011

A do-it-yourself colonoscopy? Sign me up

    The best way to treat cancer is to find it early. So when I turned 60 in June, I went for a check-up. COVID-19 might have kept me away. But I had made the appointment before the pandemic started, and by then the crisis had dialed back a notch. I didn’t want to cancel, so masked up and went in to get poked and prodded.
     Everything seemed shipshape: heart beating, lungs receiving air. My doctor scanned his laptop: 10 years since my last colonoscopy — a probe with a tiny camera, checking out the intestines for cancerous polyps. Time for another.
     I grimaced and echoed the classic toddler complaint, “Do I hafta?” thinking of guzzling a gallon of MiraLAX, used to clean out the plumbing the evening before the procedure. Not fun.
     No, the doctor said, now there is a home test ...
     Great, I said, hopping up, let’s do that. Never considering what a home test meant. Forgetting all about it, in fact, until a cube-shaped box showed up, a Cologuard kit from Exact Sciences Laboratories of Madison, Wisconsin.
     Here it is probably best not to go into too much graphic detail, though that is coming. You might want to set this aside until after breakfast.

     In the kit: is a plastic bracket to be placed over the toilet; a stout white jar, or “sample container,” that sits in the center of the bracket and is aimed for; and a little vial with a wand in it — rather like mascara — that is later dipped into the contents of the jar. The wand is there because Cologuard tests for two things: both DNA revealing early cancer, and the blood that can be a sign of late-stage cancers.
     Filling the jar is ... not a pleasant process. A certain blank determination is required — emptying your mind and following instructions. When I was at Step 5(f) “Turn the lid to tighten until it does not tighten anymore,” I had a thought, and that thought was, “Who opens the jar?”

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Tomatoes to the rescue

      

     How many years? Three. Four? Maybe five? So many that I was starting to feel stupid even planting them at all. Like some crazy man who every year dug out all the weeds and grass and crap from a 10 x 10 plot in the backyard, bought six or seven tomato plants at $4 or $5 a pop, then carefully planted them and caged them, and religiously watered them, knowing full well that the plants would grow, but would never grow tomatoes. Then in the fall, or winter, or early spring at the latest, I'd reverse the process, dig up all the miserable desiccated failures, return the twisted tomato cadges to their spot behind the garage for another few months, until it was time to repeat the process after Mother's Day.
     Year after year—and here's the sad, sick thing—I had given up the hope of growing tomatoes. I didn't plant a garden because I expected tomatoes. I just planted it because it was one of the nutsy futile time-wasting things I do, like writing books.
     OK, I exaggerate. There were tomatoes. Hard, green spheres that were even worse than nothing at all. The promise of a tomato. Then a long span of waiting. Then a stone mockery.
    Not this year. First the cherry tomatoes came in, a ruby red vanguard. They arrived in platoons. En masse. They were sliced into salads and popped, liquid sunshine, into my mouth standing in the garden. They're out there now. I can't eat them fast enough.
     But the cherry tomatoes were just the opening act. To my amazement, they were shoved off center stage by the Main Event. These big guys, the size of baseballs, and in quantity. It didn't even matter if the squirrels got a couple, because there are a lot more where they came from. We filled our arms with tomatoes and took them back to the house. My wife put them in salads with fresh mozzarella and basil—also grown in the garden—dribbled with fig vinegar. Tomatoes accompanying omelets, or just set out with fresh fruit as finger food. They are that good.
     I have a way of anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. I can pity a lost sock, picture it slouched on a wooden bench in bus station in Toledo, having slipped out of the dryer and set out searching for a truer mate.
     So it was easy to see these tomatoes, which are animate, in a low key vegetative way, as benign protective forces, these big red beasts, lumbering onto the scene, lending a hand. Heroes, arriving as they have in the weirdest summer ever. Deciding, in their tomato wisdom, to show up now.
     Well, I can't help but suspect that it was intentional .Maybe the tomatoes were withholding their forces. Waiting in reserve. Like reinforcements. Knowing how massively 2020 was going to suck, with its COVID-19 and economic entropy, its travel bans and our jabbering dupe of a president growing more unhinged by the hour, the looming November election giving off shrieking warnings of impending calamity, shrill sirens that rattle your teeth.
     Sure, the tomatoes would have added flavor and color to 2019. Or cheered up 2018. But would we have appreciated the way they're appreciated now? I think not. Fresh-picked tomatoes I grew myself are a lifeline in 2020, a reminder that not matter how we fuck up the world, with our carnival of cretinism politics and our shredded social fabric, our bottomless fear and outsized hatred, that we can't touch tomatoes. They come through in a pinch, in their own sweet time, sometimes when we need them most.

Public works works for you

   This was so much fun. My editor at the Northbrook Voice suggested I write something about their public works department. She didn't have to ask twice. I had a busy and fascinating morning with director of public works Kelly Hamill, who organized such a varied schedule that conveying it was more an act of stenography than writing. The men I met are obviously great at what they do, good guys and proud to show off their realm. I loved learning that drips are located, in essence, by putting your ear to a fire hydrant and listening.

     A water tower needs filling, having been empty for months during repainting. A parking lot, torn up to fix a ruptured main, must be resurfaced. There’s a leak somewhere in a water line turning a resident’s front lawn sodden. A storm sewer inlet must be reconstructed over in Normandy Hills. Coolant is leaking at Fire Station 11, and another balky air conditioning system waits at Fire Station 12. 
     Not to forget the constant quiet invasion of roots into hundreds of miles of storm sewers. There are trees to be trimmed and others cut down— five of the Village’s full-time maintenance workers are certified arborists. Plus there are 150 vehicles from tower ladder firetrucks to police cars that must be kept running. 
     In other words, a typical Wednesday for Northbrook’s Public Works Department. 
     “That’s the short list,” said Paul Risinger, General Operations Superintendent. 
     Also on the list is the Village’s water plant, which functions by bringing water in or sending it out. Unlike many suburbs, Northbrook doesn’t buy water from Chicago.

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Texas notes: Real life

     As the COVID crisis unspools, month after month, rather then get more ordinary, it seems to get stranger, a quality that Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey elucidates in today's report.

     The world around doesn't seem real. It's like we're living in a version of "The Truman Show." No hint as obvious as a huge stage light marked SIRUS (9 CANIS MAJOR) falling out of the sky, revealing our reality to be false, like in the movie. But that sense of falseness is real, ironically.
     There's a vague sense of disconnection from your surroundings. Maybe you are on an evening walk and see your neighbors in their lit-up homes, watching TV or sitting at a kitchen table laughing together. You feel so far removed it’s as though you are looking into a Hollywood set. Everyone daydreams and wanders off in their minds from time to time. With COVID- stress and a surreal time in history, I’ve been noticing this sense of separation between myself and the world more often. It’s a somewhat comfortable place to be, as though I am in a bubble or a glass jar where I am safe and protected from all outside influences. I no longer try to keep up with the Jones’s or feel my life is less than it should be. COVID solitude— living a simple life untethered by fear of missing out, or pressure to get dressed up for an imaginary audience of strangers, has proven to bring me closer to myself.
     I’ve thrived in the peace and quiet of the 2020 world. I can simply put one foot in front of the other (last night it was about 20,000 steps) and exist in the moment with less pressure from the outside. I wonder if I will ever be able to rejoin a bustling society again?
   

  I didn’t realize this new reality was forming until last night. I was on a walk and became acutely aware that I was in the middle of a serene and beautiful neighborhood. I felt I was seeing it for the first time even though I’ve lived here for over a year. Most of the lawns are well manicured or have an intentionally funky style, and the homes are lovely—older models with wooden porches and Adirondack chairs in sets of two, as well as brand new sleek designs appealing to the California crowd who are infiltrating trendy Austin.
     Some of my neighbors don’t like the gentrification and that makes sense to me on a sociopolitical level. As a newcomer it doesn’t really rattle my chain like it did to watch Bucktown do the same in Chicago where folks I knew were being pushed out with rising property taxes. Instead, it’s soothing to see the austere minimalist landscapes of bonsai-like bushes and strategically placed cacti amidst crisp white gravel, and hear the sounds of families splashing around in chlorine-free saltwater pools, unseen behind repurposed barnyard-wood privacy fences.
     There is enough of an eclectic flair that still permeates the neighborhood to make it feel like weird old hippyish Austin of Richard Linklater days. His 1990 movie "Slacker" perfectly encompasses the original Austin vibe. Joseph Jones, in the movie, is a skinny gray haired man who aimlessly meanders around near the University of Texas campus in central Austin, recording his thoughts into an old fashioned, corded and battery operated device. “The more the pain grows, the more this instinct for life somehow asserts itself. The necessary beauty in life is in giving yourself to it completely. Only later will it clarify itself and become coherent.”

      After I first started visiting Austin in the '90s when my sister moved here, downtown was still a ramshackle haven for wandering beatniks. It’s hard to believe how much this town has grown and changed into a thriving urban mecca of start-ups with a skyline that might rival Chicago’s one day. Keep Austin Weird tire covers still pepper the roads on the backs of old beat-up jeeps as well as brand new hipster models, the same words making very different points— one says “I am an original therefore I belong,” and the other says “I want to belong here too.”
     When I first moved to Austin in 2014 I noticed lampposts papered with “Don’t Move Here” stickers. I felt a little guilty but I also felt the right to be here since I was grandfathered in by an almost-original, my sister who’s cool enough to have discovered this place when it was still a frontier. I overhead everyone taking about how much they hated the insurgence of city-folks flocking to their special southern town. At this point there’s no sense in complaining anymore—we have become little California and some West Coast kids are just figuring out that Austin is the place to be and they are still coming in droves. As of last year we were seeing about 150 people move here per day—that’s about 55,000 per year. Hold onto your hats cowboys, the city folk have arrived and they are not going anywhere. The housing market is booming.

     These days it’s normal to see Teslas nestled between pick-up trucks the size of small houses, and somehow we are (kind of) sharing the roads. Things seem a bit friendlier with less traffic during this semi-shutdown. Previously we were a daily parking lot that could actually compare to New York traffic nightmares. I wonder if this will change, and the terrible road rage and regular accidents I saw on the roads before the pandemic will resume. I hope not. Perhaps we will have learned about the precious nature of life when this is all over. I know things won’t be the same as they were before as we get on the other side of this crisis, but they will be a lot closer to normal than they are now. Let’s look to Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, to guide us out of this strange alter reality and back to a simpler life as we once knew it. A life where we automatically flipped each other off as we raced to and from overcrowded restaurants and fought each other for the rare Saturday night movie seat at the theater. One can only hope.

‘It’s been hard. I’m not going to lie’—Teen mom's life looking up

     Kitty Perez’s first name is a nickname. Her birth name is “Katsumi,” and learning that, a person might be forgiven — I hope — for peering closer at the eyes above the mask and asking if she’s Japanese.
     She’s not, she says, laughing. Her father named her for a Japanese porn star.
     “I was his first kid,” she explains. “So everything was kinda weird.”
     We are sitting in the brightly painted main room of the Crib, the Night Ministry’s youth shelter that moved earlier this year from a church basement in Wrigleyville to larger quarters at 1735 N. Ashland Ave. in West Town. The Night Ministry invited me to tour the new space and, so I didn’t visit an empty room, arranged for me to talk with former residents. Perez stood out. 

    “Right now, I’m sort of in the middle of transition over to an apartment,” says Perez, 19. “I’m also a mother. I have an almost 2-year-old daughter. She’ll be 2 in November.”
     And how has that been?
     “It’s been hard. I’m not going to lie. My ... well, I don’t call him my ‘partner’ at all. I call him my ‘sperm donor.’ Because he left as soon as I told him. He bounced, completely, to a different state. It’s been hard, especially during the pandemic. I couldn’t find no diapers anywhere. I couldn’t find no wipes. Everyone just stocked up on everything; I couldn’t find anything.”

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