Flashback 1998: Secrets of the lost-and-found

Untitled, by Jannis Kounellis (Hirshhorn Museum) 

     I was looking for clips related to the Museum of Science & Industry, and I found this. It's the kind of column that I really like, in that it's filled with things, yet imbued with an overarching sense of humanity and all its inscrutability. 

     Caitlin's "Petite Miss" diary is there, as is Alicia A. Wilkey's purse. There is a pair of skis, plus many pillows, blankets, suitcases, eyeglasses, wallets, sets of keys, cameras and cell phones. At least a dozen Bibles. Four coolers. Mike Hoffman's wallet is waiting, the cash still inside, as is Ivory Thomas' LaSalle Bank savings account bankbook.
     All are inventoried and stacked in the tidy little lost-and-found room in the basement of Union Station, a treasure trove of mystery presided over by Amtrak agent Steve Napoli.
     "What I can't understand is the wheelchairs," he said. "I've had three wheelchairs. How do you forget a wheelchair?"
     Almost every large public place in Chicago has its own lost-and-found—museums and shopping centers, concert halls and office buildings. Sad collections of ownerless ephemera, keys that will never find their locks, photograph albums that will never draw a spark of recognition.
      While lost-and-founds have certain things in common—wherever people go, they tend to lose the same things—each has its own particular brand of mystery and drama.
     "We typically have things like wallets, keys, lots of sunglasses and favorite dolls or stuffed animals," said Kate Desulis, membership and visitor services coordinator at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, who also manages the lost-and-found. "A couple of times we've had shoes, usually one. I often wonder how people manage to hike back from the trail with only one shoe."
     Desulis said it is particularly satisfying to be able to reunite a doll with its owner.
     "We often get frantic calls from the mothers who want to know if little Betty is found," she said. "They're very excited when we can tell them, `Yes, we have your doll.' "
     Carlton Bolden, special-projects coordinator for visitors services at the Museum of Science and Industry, says the most common items are sweaters, though he has noticed the shoe mystery, too.
     "The only thing I can assume is either somebody changed shoes or, who knows, maybe they bought new ones and thought this would be a good dumping ground for the old ones," he said.
     One rather personal and expensive lost item sticks in Bolden's mind.
     "At one point we had a retainer turned in," he said, noting it was never claimed. "I would think you would miss it, you would look for it. Those things aren't cheap."
     He also recalls the time a child lost her Giga Pet.
     "We kept getting calls for it," he said. "It was just like a lost baby."
     Most lost-and-founds will take steps to reunite items to their owners, though not all. If you lose your wallet at Northwestern University's Norris Center student union, you're out of luck. "We have a few wallets with IDs," said Stephanie Carr, class of '98, who works at the front desk. "For some reason we don't really call people."
     Mike Sawyer, the house manager at Orchestra Hall, says they do just the opposite there, going to great effort to reunite patrons with their belongings. He once drove to the home of a disoriented elderly patron who donned two coats belonging to his box mates, leaving his own behind.
      "We traced him through the ticketing department," Sawyer said. "That was very unusual."
     Sawyer said that the contents of the lost-and-found box varies with the seasons. "We're mostly lost gloves in the winter," he said. "Spring and fall, an awful lot of umbrellas turn up."
     One thing they don't hold past the end of a performance is food.
     "We hold them until the end of the concert and then down the tube they go," he said.
     Amtrak's Napoli said they also get lots of food. "We'll open up a bag and find a hot dog in its bun," he said.
     But they also get far more valuable items.
     "I had a bag of rubies, diamonds, emeralds," he said. "There was also a set of cruise tickets. I found (the owners) through the cruise tickets, in Florida."
     The most surprising thing about the jewelry incident, Napoli said, was the couple wasn't as frantic as you'd expect people losing a bag of jewels would be.
     "When I called, they were so matter-of-fact," he said. "They were like: `Oh, you found them. Thanks.' "

                       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 19, 1998

Happy people who treat everyone nicely

A Rotary International luncheon in Fairfield, Illinois in January, 2017.

     Not much changes in Fairfield, Illinois.
     “Honestly? No. It really hasn’t changed much,” said L. Bryan Williams, who owns an insurance company there.
     The seat of Wayne County is right where we left it four years ago, 275 miles due south of Chicago, when I visited just before the inauguration of Donald Trump.
     Why go then? Well, if you line up Illinois’ 102 counties by how they voted in the 2016 election, Cook County was at one end, with 74.4% voting for Hillary Clinton. And Wayne County was at the other end, with 84.3% voting for Trump.
     Why return now? As we enter the Joe Biden administration at noon Wednesday, it seems worthwhile to circle back to Fairfield, and see how they’re doing and what they think about the four years past, where we are now, and where we’re going. Perhaps it’ll give a glimpse of what’s ahead.
     There is one change here: even fewer jobs. When I visited in 2017, the big employer in town, Airtex, an automobile fuel pump manufacturer, had just shut down, sending nearly 1,000 jobs to Mexico and China. But the lights were still on and several dozen people were still here, administering. Now the lights are off. Even the skeleton crew is gone.
     ”The community has adapted to not having Airtex here,” said Williams. “It’s become a little bit more of a bedroom community. But you wouldn’t see anything startling.”
     That depends on what startles a person.

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Did the military save the country and forget to tell us?

 

    Are we out of the woods?

     Or will the crazy desperate thing come today?
    Not that 1/6, the rally/clown coup wasn't both crazy and desperate. But you hate to dust your hands and declare Donald Trump finished. Because there always seems to be another handful of crazy dust left in his bag of tricks. 

     But maybe .. just maybe ... the worst thing that'll happen Tuesday is he'll pardon 100 of the lowest of the low, including himself and his family. Olly, olly, oxen free. 

     Then we'll have gotten off light.

     Of course, if Trump's four years of standard shredding marks the low point of our nation's flirtation with despotism, we'll have gotten off light. There are hells below this one, traitors like Ted Cruz in a runner's crouch, waiting to lead us there, and millions upon millions of Americans obviously eager to race right behind.
     Maybe that's why I can't write any grand "What it all meant" column. Because I can't believe it's over. Maybe that's some dilute form of PTSD. The prisoner, freed, crossing his hands behind his back still, as if bound. Because trauma has a momentum. It endures.

     Were the Trump years traumatic? Not in any way like it was for the kids in those cages. Wonder when the full truth of that comes out? Not that we don't know the horrid outlines. But the details, the particulars. That'll start coming out; I'm surprised it hasn't already. Or maybe it has and our blown out senses don't register, don't let us be shocked. Not the way we should be. Or maybe it's just me. I can't tell anymore.

      Okay, let's wrap this up and get back to writing Wednesday's column. Before I go, I will say one thing, and this strays into the predictive, almost always a mistake. But why not? Everybody is saying everything all the time anyway. 

      We should be grateful for the military. As a child of the '60s, I was raised to look askance at the armed forces. The whole Vietnam War, it soured us civilians. 

     And the military hadn't been called upon to really, truly save democracy since they kicked the Nazis out of France. 

      But my hunch is, they did it again—saved democracy, that is—and people don't even know it, yet. I would bet money that once the Trump enormity is sent back to the gold-plated hell from whence it came, and the facts start dribbling out, it will be revealed that he tried to sound out the top brass to attempt a real overthrow of the government, rather than firing up his sedition rabble for their freeform storming of the Capitol. Do you have any doubt Trump did? You can't say it isn't the sort of thing he would do. It's exactly the sort of thing he would do. The sort of thing he has already done.

      I'm not certain. How could I be? Not 100 percent. Maybe whatever aide was in the room wrestled the red phone out of his hand. But call it a hunch. I would bet there is some ugly story of Trump browbeating a general or two, demanding they hand the country over to his tender mercies, and that general just shook his head and said, "Sir, that just isn't going to happen." What's Churchill's line after the Battle of Britain? Never was so much owed by so many to so few.

Online magic scratches live theater itch

Scott Silven

     After I turned this in I learned that the Sun-Times reviewed "The Journey" last Wednesday. I asked my boss if we should just scrap the column and I'd whip together something else. But he felt the two pieces are different enough to slip this through. So after you read my take, if you want a detailed, spot on review of the performance by freelancer Catey Sullivan, you can find it here.

     The initials in the title “R.U.R” — a science fiction play by Czech writer Karel Čapek — stand for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” which introduced the word “robot” into the English language. The production I saw at Cleveland’s Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival ended with the robot lovers, Primus and Helena, freezing on stage as the lights came up, a neat bit of stage business. I kept turning as I filed out with the rest of the audience, to see if they were still standing there, motionless, holding hands. They were. 

     That was also 50 years ago, a reminder of the power of theater to move us, shape us, take a moment, or an image, and make it part of our consciousness, forever.
     Something we’ve been missing sorely for the past 11 months — those who go to shows, anyway — and it might give a sense of how small a crew that is if you consider the verbiage spent mourning the inability to eat in restaurants versus the scant attention given the near complete loss of Chicago’s vibrant live theater. Not to forget the hole kicked in the livelihoods of thousands of actors, stagehands, wardrobe chiefs, lighting technicians and ticket salespeople.
     On-screen live performance just isn’t the same. Since the pandemic struck, I’ve seen three theatrical productions online. 
     There was a TV version of Jane Austen my wife was watching that seemed tinny and abrasive. I bailed out after 10 minutes. And I tried to introduce “Hamilton” to the boys, but we weren’t in a theater, hadn’t paid $180 a ticket, and the show never grabbed them. After a polite half hour they begged off.
     And “The Journey” Thursday night, a one-man show by Scottish illusionist Scott Silven, presented by Chicago Shakespeare Theater, which cracked the secret of getting me to try live online performance. They asked. It’s a magic act, not a play, but I don’t mind magic. The last show I saw in Chicago before the world shut down was Penn & Teller at the Chicago Theater in November 2019. A century ago. They were good.
     “The Journey” takes place in a single room, and close-in magic works well on a small screen. The audience, limited to 30, is at times projected in the room, and the basic conjurer’s routine of asking questions of volunteers draws viewers in, underscoring the live quality. We’d been asked to bring an object of personal significance, and I brought a fossil trilobite, which meshed nicely — or should that be inexplicably? — with Silven’s theme of home and time and stones, small cairns which were part of the act.

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"Whose Karen Is It?"

  

     National Public Radio is proud of its engaging stories, dubbed "Driveway Moments," those compelling programs whose blend of narrative, humor, pathos and suspense keeps a driver glued to the car radio, even when the destination is reached and he would snap off less captivating fare, but is forced to sit in the car in the driveway, listening.

     But after this morning, I'm wondering if lingering in the driveway is any measure of highbrow creative merit.
     The boys were home, and the car radio had, perhaps through their handiwork, shifted from the usual WXRT 93.1 FM to the unfamiliar 101.1 FM WKQX. Saturday morning, returning from dropping our dog off at the groomer, I found myself listening for the first time to the Brian, Ali and Justin show, one of their "Whose Karen Is It?" segments, where the hosts try to match a "Karen"—an unhinged, complaining woman—to her home neighborhood in Chicago.
     Before we launch into the topic, I couldn't spotlight the imaginative, thoughtful, and not-at-all entitled or in any way testy musings of Caren Jeskey without pointing out that the whole "Karen" trope is mean, unfair, sexist and past its pull date, not to forget being the slasher-movie morality of identifying someone as vile so you can unleash all the cruelty upon them that supposedly so bothered you in the first place. 

     But that realization only came later, with a bit of guidance from my wife, as illumination all too often does. Complaining men don't get the same treatment. Nor do we know whose bad moment is being captured. Maybe they're having an awful day. Maybe they're mentally ill. Maybe they're right.
     The host read a note found taped to the windshield of a car, basically extending dibs, presumptive enough after a snowfall, to a general claim on a parking space, 365 days a year.
     "I am so pissed off that these fucking transplants don't know the rules around here," it begins. "I've been calling dibs on 2 parking spots in front of my house for 5 years now without any issues. Everyone on the block knows these our [sic] my parking spots..."
     The game is to guess where in the city this woman lives. It has its own page on the WKQX web site and you can see the full social media post there. 

     The first caller  guessed that the author of the note is from Bridgeport—he himself is from Bridgeport—while allowing that the note being typed and not scrawled in a nearly illegible hand did, indicated it might be from somewhere more advanced than the neighborhood that spawned the Daleys. 
     Wrong! Complete with canned sound effect and host hilarity.

     What kept my interest was how the game was that it served as a quick survey of how residents of various parts of the city are viewed by others. Callers guessed Lincoln Park, Edison Park, Marionette Park. There seemed to be a lot of callers, impressive for a Saturday, and they greeted the hosts with "ahoy!" which had a certain Jimmy Buffett appeal.
     It went on and, eventually, I went inside and, in checking the station's web site to see who I was listening to, I realized I was able to keep listening. They must have dragged the bit out over a half hour.
     While listening, I did my due diligence. It turns out that this very segment caused controversy last fall when someone guessed Skokie. Robert Feder of course had the full story:

"It might be time for Brian Haddad to consider dropping “Whose Karen Is It?” from his morning show on Cumulus Media alternative rock WKQX 101.1-FM. Wednesday’s installment of the weekly bit (purportedly based on a woman charging her friends and family $80 per person for Thanksgiving dinner) took a bizarre turn when a caller unleashed some unmistakably anti-Semitic tropes about 'those people' in Skokie. "

     Obviously the station isn't taking Robert's wise counsel, always a mistake. Though Haddad did immediately apologize. That's good enough for me. As I've said before, if I refused to partake in the creative efforts of anti-Semites, I'd be sitting alone in a bare white-walled room listening to klezmer music while tossing cards into a hat.
      I was still listening when the mystery was solved.
     "Mark, ahoy, whose Karen is it?" said one host.
     "Everyone who lives in Bucktown only shops in Bucktown, they never leave Bucktown, I gotta think it's Bucktown, I know them," the caller said.
    "You got it, Mark, it's Bucktown!" More sound effects, etc.

     The most noteworthy thing is the callers seem to think "dibs" is a gentrified phenomenon, while I think of it as an entrenched, I've-lived-in-Mayfair-30-years kind of thing. Maybe it's both. 
     They call Saturday's show a "Throwback"—meaning, I assume, that it was a re-broadcast of a show earlier in the week.
     I kept listening, and they played "Do I Wanna Know?" by the Arctic Monkeys, which seems less crappy than I would expect on contemporary glad talk music fare.
     The topic shifted to pedicures and cutting your toenails and I was able to easily bail out.
     I don't want to overstate the case. But in my business, no wonder should go unremarked upon. Maybe I'm biased, and assume such shows are more brain dead than they actually are. I still set the station back to WXRT—you gotta dance with who brung ya—but I was encouraged by the episode. Maybe I'm looking for encouragement lately. Maybe we all are.

Texas notes: Snow

     Now when I need to describe Caren Jeskey briefly, I'll be able to say, "She is a woman who..." Well, I shouldn't give it away. Her Saturday report:

     It snowed in Texas. At first I thought it would be nothing but a sad smattering. Yet as the day wore on it started sticking. Yes, a respectable snowfall after all. Part of me wanted to hunker down in bed for the day. After all, it was a Sunday and I finally had an excuse to stay in. Nearly every day in Austin, year round, is too nice to justify staying inside; but today I was allowed to eat some raw cookie dough, maybe bake a few cookies, drink coffee and stay under blankets in bed.
     But wait; this just can’t be. I am a Chicagoan. 30s and snowy means heading out for the day, not succumbing to wimp-dom.

    To get motivated, I got onto Facebook and posted on Buy Nothing, a local gift exchange group. “Who would like me to walk a package of Trader Joe’s cookie dough over to your porch?” Within moments a mother of a young child commented “we’d love it!” I bundled up, grateful for the snow boots I’d worn only once before in the past seven years of living in Austin. I set out with the cookie dough and also an unopened jar of Nutella. My neighbor saved me from lying around eating hazelnut chocolate spread out of the jar all day while listening to children frolic in the white powder in the park just behind my house.
     I set out the mile or so to my neighbor’s place, and dropped the goodies off on her stoop.
     I’d forgotten the magic of being outdoors on a snowy day. The white stuff nestled in cactus limbs and confused the fronds of palm trees. The juxtaposition of cacti and snow was stark and somehow cleansing to the soul.  

     I spent the rest of the day wandering around and marveling at the joy this day was bringing to me and everyone else smart enough to immerse ourselves into nature’s gift. Countless snow creatures sprung up all around, peppering a big field and perching on fenceposts and car hoods. Some were muddy and covered with leaves. Still, they all became my friends for the day. Each snow person had a personality of its own. I rested my head on one of their shoulders and felt like a content child.
     Back home in Rogers Park, Chicago, five inches or more of white, fluffy snow invited us out to romp and play on many winter days. Heck, sometimes on Fall or Spring days too. We’d toss snowballs around, and then we’d make snow friends with coal eyes, carrot noses, top hats, and scarves, until our fingers were numb. When our clothes got wet and our sweat started to freeze, we’d spill into the foyer of our house, shed soggy boots and frozen gloves, and gather around the kitchen table for hot cocoa with marshmallows floating on top.         

     Snow play was exhausting. We’d make our way to couches in the sunken den, cover up with blankets, and mom and dad would turn the TV to Frosty The Snowman or The Sound of Music. Dad would pop popcorn and drench it with butter and we’d half watch, half doze to the sounds of the television.
     Eventually we’d groggily watch the closing credits and slowly make our way up to our bedrooms, or maybe Dad would carry us, one at a time— or sometimes two!
     The next morning the ground would be a smooth glistening blanket, and everything was quiet. Red cardinals and black ravens perched on branches. We’d put our almost-dry boots and mittens back on, and venture out for another day of fun. What a wonderful thing, snow.
     

           Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
            —Robert Frost

Thank you for your expression of contempt

The Casualty, by Josiah Eidmann (Northbrook Public Library)

     Happy about Donald Trump being impeached a second time?
     Me neither.
     Don’t get me wrong. It was richly earned and necessary. But it also had an almost obligatory quality. The way a news report about a drunk driver plowing into a group of schoolchildren might end by saying the suspect is charged with six counts of vehicular homicide, plus driving while intoxicated on a suspended license and failure to yield to pedestrians.
     You almost smile, ruefully, at that last bit and think, “Yeah, that ‘failure to yield’ rap is really going to haunt him.”
     People were going on about the historic second impeachment. Oh boy, Trump sure is marinating in shame now! Two impeachments.
     The first one barely registered; hard to see what doubling will do.
     The problem is, once you start ignoring reality, the scope of the specific reality being ignored hardly matters. If you’re encased in your own willful darkness and can’t see an acoustical tile ceiling, you also won’t see the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
     That’s why I try to never argue with readers. First, for that very reason: they’re readers, and I truly appreciate their being here, reading, despite occasional geysers of toxicity. It isn’t that I coddle them, per se. But if they write in saying they subscribe and the moon is made of blue cheese, I might respond by observing that I like blue cheese on a steak salad.

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