Ravenswood Notes: Ice Cream

     This is not the first description of Zephyr's to appear in EGD, though Caren Jeskey here remembers it as a child, and I remembered it as a parent, specifically one who had to cope with a child who has spewed the remnants of a hot fudge sundae all over the ice cream parlor's immaculate white bathroom. I like Caren's memories better.

     Son of Frankenstein was a six-scoop banana split that friends and I shared in the 80s at Zephyr Café & Ice Cream Parlor. You may recall the Art Deco style diner that rested on the corner of Wilson and Ravenswood for 30 years between 1976 and its demise in 2006.
     Zephyr was opened by Greek restauranteur Byron Kouris, who Chicago also has to thank (in part, along with co-founder Mike Payne) for Byron’s Hot Dogs. Byron’s started as a little stand on Irving Park Road in 1975, and still exists in two outposts on the north side. There, you can order the Dogzilla if less than a half a pound of Vienna Beef is not quite enough. I’m not criticizing— Chicago fare is and has always been a tasty and plentiful staple in my life, and I have reaped its rewards. In fact, I’ve gained a solid ten pounds in pizza crust and French fries since I have returned.
     I feel grateful for these extra pounds—honestly!—for they indicate pleasure and access to the finer things in life. (Don’t worry; I realize that Charlie Trotter’s might have been finer than Byron’s, at least in some regards). I also realize that being able to tell stories of my favorite teenaged ice cream parlors illustrates my privilege.
     According to FINCA International, a non-profit microfinance organization with many accolades for their benevolent works, over 1 billion people on our planet live on $2.50 or less per day— less than it costs for a hotdog, fries and soda. This includes 280 million people in extreme poverty who live on less than $1.25 per day. No Dogzillas for them.
     The children and families held up at our borders, simply looking for the good life, know all too well how this feels. Many will never know the indulgent bliss of childhood that I once knew.
     Some my favorite memories include receiving badges boasting “I Just Made a Pig of Myself” at Farrells' in Woodfield Mall, and countless nights of fun, food and family at the Pickle Barrel on Howard & Western where, for some reason, we loved that the floors were peppered with sawdust. As I get older I am increasingly humbled at the good fortune I was born into, and surprised at how much I’ve come up with to complain about, nonetheless.
     As Bob Marley said in his song Wisdom, “destruction of the poor is poverty. Destruction of the soul is vanity… the righteous' wealth is in his Holy Place.” In the song "Problems," his son Ziggy sings “All over the world there are problems… stop wishing, stop waiting, stop mistaking… we got to do our best and solve them. Stop wishing, stop waiting, stop thinking of a fairy tale.” Horace Andy sings “[I] hear the rich man complaining, he got rich problems. [I] hear the poor man complaining, he got poor problems.”
     Now that I’ve come home to Chicago, I am determined to appreciate the international city full of opportunity from which I’ve sprung. A distant but favorite family member died today after a devastating, unexpected stroke. COVID has taught us that not only is death inevitable, but it's ever present for all of us. I am not a religious person. I do not believe in heaven, or an afterlife. When Bob Marley talks about the Holy Place, I think of heaven on earth. Making the very best of this one precious life.
 

Klan boosting Cubs owner relevant today

Charles Weeghman

 
   If Todd Ricketts is curious — and I doubt he is, but let’s pretend — about how history might someday view him, he can get a hint by looking at the reputation of a previous Cubs co-owner, Charles Weeghman.
     “The Quick Lunch King” made a fortune selling fast eats to harried downtown workers and bought the Cubs in 1916 when they played on the West Side. He moved the team to its current location at the corner of Clark and Addison. He didn’t own it long: The economy went bad and he brought in partners, including William Wrigley.
     I wish I could say Weeghman is remembered for that or for starting the practice of allowing fans to keep baseballs batted into the stands rather than having ushers retrieve them.
     But what really radiates across the years about Weeghman is that he was a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan. On Aug. 16, 1921, — 100 years ago Monday — the largest rally of the Klan ever on Illinois soil took place on Weeghman’s Lake Zurich farm.
     How does that balance with Todd Ricketts — not to be confused with his brother, Cubs Chairman Tom, more circumspect about his politics — being the finance chairman of the Trump Victory Committee? Plus various fundraisers held for the toxic fraud, white supremacist and fomenter of rebellion against the United States. Suppose that depends whether we are at the end of our nation’s shredding of its democratic values and traditions or only the beginning. The Klan also tried to keep minorities from voting, but Trumpers are more methodical about it.
     In Ricketts’ defense — I try to be fair — his mom, Marlene, gave $3 million to an anti-Trump campaign. Plus there is an element of prejudice in every human heart.  Evil is attractive — the devil is a gentleman, remember — and it draws in the most unexpected people.

     There is a moment in the Klan rally on Weeghman’s farm a century ago that deserves to be shared, even savored.

To continue reading, click here.

Can a hot dog bun make a sandwich?

 
     Space is limited....
     Well, okay, "space" is not limited. In fact, space is unlimited, extending out billions of lightyears beyond our ability to see an end. There's more than enough.
     What I meant was, "space in a newspaper is limited." Which is why, when I wrote about my visit S. Rosen's bakery Aug. 2, I never got around to addressing an existential question that long puzzled me, one I meant to examine and did indeed raise with one of Alpha Baking's owners, Mark R. Marcucci.
     Why don't people use hot dog buns for sandwiches?
     Because I will take a hamburger bun and put, oh, chicken on it, or even bologna, in pinch. Tuna salad, certainly. A fish fillet.
     But I'd never do that to a hot dog bun. Something seems wrong with that, though my wife does it when circumstances arise—an extra bun, a taste for a sandwich. I took it as an example of her sometimes shocking economy. Not quite washing and re-using a Baggie, but in the same realm of excessive thrift. Pressing a hot dog bun to an unnatural purpose.
      Like many, I had confused my own personal practices for what the whole world does.
     "I've seen all sorts of sandwiches being made on hot dog buns," Marcucci replied.
     "He will take a hot dog bun and put jelly on one side, peanut butter on the other," said Stephanie Powell, director of marketing at Alpha Baking. "It's transcendent."
     And away we went.
     "You can also do a vegetarian version," she said. "Grilled carrots."
     "Grilled asparagus," added Marcucci.
      A big grilled carrot on a hot dog bun! That sounds luscious. Can't you just see that? With some kind of interesting sauce. Maybe it caught my attention because I love carrots—I don't think I've mentioned that before. Carrot muffins, carrot cake, carrot soup—we served ginger carrot soup at our wedding.  You just don't get enough carrots in life, and when you do, they're inevitably the sliced and boiled form that is still good, being carrots, but not as great as a grilled carrot. I'll even eat raw carrots.      
     "Marinate it in soy sauce," said Powell. "You get the same kind of 'snap' as in a hot dog. My mother's a vegetarian."
     This is an area that cries out  for experimentation. You know what I bet would be good on a hot dog bun? Sloppy Joe. It's hard to eat Sloppy Joe on a hamburger bun—the bun tends to flop and the contents leak. You have to resort to a knife and fork, which feels like a sort of surrender. But a hot dog bun, with its brawnier "hinge," would support the hot runny Joe more effectively conveying it to your lips. I'll have to try it, if I can get over the mental hump of eating something other than a hot dog on a hot dog bun. 

     I can be surprisingly rigid that way: I still have never mixed two different types of breakfast cereal, which my wife does all the time, while I twirl a finger in the air like a Victorian villain.   
     "It's miscegenation!" I cry, with semi-serious outrage.
     "Old men ought to be explorers," T.S. Eliot wrote. Still, I can't say I'm ready to try one of her insane combinations: Cheerios and Bran Flakes, or whatever. But she did have a practice that I always gagged at. She would take fresh blueberries, and put them on her cereal. Which I thought was just gross, for 30 years or so. But curiosity got the better of me, and I gave into it, having some blueberries on my Wheat Chex. And you know what? It was good, so good that I went from never having my cereal that way to always eating it that way. From never doing it to having to do it. The passion of the convert. Now, if there are no blueberries, I can't even enjoy a bowl of Wheat Chex. I have to wait until we get some more blueberries. Which shows you just how dangerous experimentation can be. We cling to the old ways for a reason.

We’re doomed, but no reason to get upset

 

     Robert Frost wondered whether the world will end in fire, or in ice.
     While fire is clearly winning, I believe the world really ends through cowardice. Though “cowardice” isn’t the right word; the exact term is hard to put a finger on. “Denialism,” maybe. Head-in-the-sandism. The human tendency to see a hole in the ground, understand it is there in our path, then fall in it anyway, eyes open, because this is the route we always take, and we’ll be damned if we’re going to deviate. We’re no sidesteppers!
     Long before people were denying the usefulness of masks or refusing life-saving vaccines, they were pooh-poohing global warming. It isn’t happening or, if it is, it’s caused by natural shifts. Not by people, oh no no no, we wouldn’t wreck our world through carelessness. Since it’s not our fault, there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Nobody actually pounds the floor with their fists and whines, “We don’t wanna! Doing stuff is hard!” But that is the general tone.
     The past few years we’ve seen a series of heat waves, brutal droughts, record floods, massive storms. A gathering drumbeat of doom so loud even some Republicans suspect there might be something going on. The latest shoe dropped Monday, a report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
     Where to begin?
     “All is lost,” is not a phrase you see much in professional journalism, even in the negative, “not all is lost,” used in Monday’s New York Times, trying to focus on the dwindling hope that a hotter planet, with melting ice sheets and rising seas might yet be mitigated. Though even that optimism is yanked away in the headline: “A HOTTER FUTURE IS NOW INEVITABLE, A U.N. REPORT SAYS.”
     What is odd, to me, is that the same people denying climate change also crave upheaval. They’ll quote the Book of Revelations and announce the world is ending, based on nothing. But let the world’s scientists join hands and chant, “Yes, the world is indeed ending, at least as the cool green place we’ve known and loved,” and suddenly they’re covering their ears and humming. Then what’s with all the stockpiled weaponry? The freeze-dried food? Geez, climate change ought to be your dream come true.
     I decided to read the report itself, rather than just reports of the report.
     Formally titled “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis” the report has a blue cover and is ... ah ... 3,949 pages long. Quite a lot, really. Well, let’s begin. “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.”

To continue reading, click here.

The incredible vanishing mayor.

     I sometimes wonder about Rich Daley's world.
     He's still alive—it's easy to forget that. Seventy-nine, living in Chicago, supposedly. I imagine he has a circle, family friends, former cronies, underlings who hung around. People who made a killing from a Bridgeport connection, still paying court, out of habit, just in case. Various boards he sits in, a law firm he has some kind of association with.
     And a legacy of ... what? Daley strained so mightily to escape his father's shadow, but never did. "Mayor Daley" is still his father, for bad or worse. Though Ritchie did help the city: bringing the 1996 Democratic National Convention, sprucing up the West Side. Millennium Park. Anyone who remembers the dismal expanse of rail yards that used to be right there, just past the Art Institute. It had to be done and he did it. And the Bean! Who doesn't love the Bean? All together now, "Thank you Mister Mayor!!!"
     Sigh. The good is overshadowed by the bad, isn't it? The spectacularly bad deals he brokered, giving away city garages, the Skyway, the Chicago's parking meter franchise—many online got a kick out of the ParkChicago sign in the corner of this photo, taken by my pal Bill Savage, though he didn't even notice the sign when he was taking it. Sometimes, as I like to say, it's better to be lucky than good.    

     Traded for a handful of magic beans, scratching this year's itch, leaving next year's problems even worse. Though in his defense, the crises during the Lori Lightfoot administration have been so extreme we barely talk about the pension time bomb anymore. Not when the city is on fire and children are mown down by gunfire so frequently we've gone numb to it.
     Just as well that Daley's gone off radar because, honestly, what could he add? His silence is a kindness. Besides, the man could be sitting right there, ready and eager to spill, and what good would it do? Trying to understand Rich Daley, as I like to say, is like trying to peel a ball bearing with your thumbnail. Try as you might, you just can't do it. Because it can't be done. I doubt the man knows his self himself. There might not be a self to know. 
     That's about it, just some words to go under Bill's cool photo of Daley's pinched, mournful mug being effaced by one of the Graffiti Blasters he created in 1993, into which the city pours millions of dollars a year to be a less colorful, less artistic place. (Not to go all in for graffiti. Much of it can be oppressive, threatening, some 16-year-old putz defacing a lovely brick wall. But the Blasters were notorious for going after ethnic murals, sometimes on private property, without permission of the owners and to the general outrage of communities).
     Look above his right eyebrow. Is it me, or is that a pig face? A scowling cartoon pig? Just an accident, surely. It couldn't be intentional. Could it?

‘Our first responsibility is caring for ourselves’

 

Rosie Seelaus

     Once I met a man who had no nose. Well, he had a nose, but it was made of silicone. A fake nose, held in place by magnets on four metal posts embedded in his face.
     He wasn’t wearing his artificial nose when we met, at the UI Health’s Craniofacial Center. He was sitting in the examining room of Rosemary Seelaus, an anaplastologist — a medical specialist who makes facial prosthetics. I shook his hand, trying to focus on his eyes.
     Our meeting rattled me, and afterward I had this thought: “I am NEVER ... going to complain about ANYTHING ... ever again!” Because this guy didn’t ask for whatever nasal cavity cancer put a big hole in the middle of his face. And he still woke up, brushed his hair, took his fake nose off his dresser and popped it into place, and went off to face the day. My woes dwindle to insignificance compared to that.
     But life doesn’t work that way. We live in difficult times. This plague showed up about February 2020, seemed like it was going away for about 15 minutes in June 2021. Now it’s August and it’s not only back, but starting to feel like the general crisis — medical, social, political — will never end. It’s getting to people.
     “In reality, I’m barely hanging on sometimes,” S.E. Cupp, whose column appears in the Sun-Times, wrote on Twitter last week. “I’m anxious all day every day about my kiddo, my health, my job, my parents, my friends, my causes, my community, my country … the truth is, it takes a huge toll. I’m sorry to vent and lay this all out there. But I’m burnt out.”
     That takes guts. I’m reluctant to say “I’m burnt out.” It would just spark a chorus of trolls. “You sure ARE, Stinkberg. Why don’t you go hang yourself?” Plus my boss pursing his lips. “Hmmm, he IS burnt out. I mean, three columns on picking up after his dog ...”
     But I can’t leave Cupp out there by herself. I feel obligated to stand with her, like the other slaves standing and saying, “I am Spartacus.” I am burnt out, too. I must have scattered a half-dozen typos in a single column last week. The copy desk plucked them out with tongs, a raised eyebrow and a polite “Do these belong to you?”

To continue reading, click here.

18th Street Brewery

     A good restaurant is a joyful thing. When someplace is rocking the food, the service, the atmosphere, it can make a person happy. Even though I dine out continually, I had forgotten just how much an eatery can supercharge your mood until Friday, when personal business took me to Hammond, Indiana.
     Now Hammond, Indiana is not a garden spot of the world. Modest apartment buildings and town homes, low industrial buildings, a trailer park as soon as you exit the freeway. A lot of liquor stores and cigarette stores and fireworks stores. Not poor, exactly, not prosperous either. Proudly hanging on. My mission was to go to the Federal courthouse, a large brutalist gray concrete structure that could be used in a James Bond movie for the secret police headquarters in Bulgaria and the audience wouldn't blink.
     It was lunchtime. My companion suggested Greek. I like Greek. "I could go for some kebab," I said. But a block or two away from the courthouse is a large brick building, The 18th Street Brewery. Which brings up a fourth important quality in the restaurant experience: luck. You need good food, great service, enjoyable atmosphere and a certain element of luck. A bit of good fortune to send you blundering across a place you didn't even know was there. Wherever this supposed Greek place was, it wasn't right in front of us, the way the 18th Street Brewery was. We went inside.

     Hard rock music. What I think of as metal, though nowadays it might be called thrasher rock or some such thing. Not my normal tasse de thé. But it fit the place. A large room, ceiling painted black, tables, a bar beyond, a big empty expanse off to our right, and to the left, a bright outdoor area, all sunlight and flowers. It was a nice day, but I figured we'd get the full 18th Street experience inside.
     Our waiter was Jerry, and he did everything a waiter is supposed to do. Greeted us in a friendly manner, showed us a table, fetched menus. A simple menu, beers on one side, with the requisite Götterdämmerung names: "Here Comes the Reaper," "Rise of the Angels" "Devils Cup"—I was in such a good mood, I could forgive the missing possessive. I liked that their "Daily Feature" was a cheeseburger, a beer, and an ounce shot of their 90 proof whiskey. Back in the day that would be my go-to move.
     My companion got a Watermelon Gose, made in a nearby brewery, which he said was very watermelony. As a non-drinker, I had to settle for a Diet Pepsi, wondering if I should mention that, with all these odd varieties, banana & marshmallow IPA and such, they might consider coming up with an NA offering. They're all the rage. Or bring in Pabst NA, to harmonize with their can leitmotif. PBR NA rocks. But I kept quiet. 
     Not a wide range of food offerings—more a bar than a restaurant—divided into "BURGERS," including a PB&J Burger made with bacon jam and cashew butter, which now that I think of it, I should have tried. And "NOT BURGERS" such as Brisket Tacos, which my tablemate got, and Pulled Pork, topped with Carolina Gold sauce and pickles on a brioche, the obvious choice for me.    

     Waiting for our order, I looked around. I liked the place graphically, if that makes sense.  The skulls, the paintings on the walls, on the floor, the Gothic stained glass window salvaged from some church. It reminded me of Green Street Smoked Meats in the city: the same fun-to-just-be-here vibe. There's a place I love in Boulder, the Dark Horse, and this made me think of it. A Dark Horsey vibe.
     A manager, Bree, swept over to check on us. I asked how old 18th Street is—seven years, she said, with outposts in Indianapolis and Gary. I was interested in the large space, lined with barrels, beyond the tables, and she explained how this is a working brewery and distillery, and while they do use it for events, otherwise they've got trucks coming and going bringing ingredients in and pallets of beer out.

     Our food appeared quickly, and here I fell down on the job, because the photo I snapped didn't come out. But they present a luscious pulled pork sandwich, the bun set half off the sandwich, displaying the meat, like a muscle car with its hood open to show off the engine. Plus tater tots, on a sheet of wax paper on an oblong metal tray. It looked delightful and tasted better. The pork smoky, the tots crisp. I have to write a post someday on why tater tots are superior to French fries, both for their crunchy-outside-pillowy-inside texture, and the fact they have "tots" in their name.

     Okay, maybe I was just in a good mood—the day was unfolding unusually well. I was somewhere other than my office, working, and in good company.   

     When the bill arrived, it came with a pair of lagniappe—small gifts to seal the deal. Stickers. A detail, a nicety, something I expected from Alinea and didn't get. The three Michelin star place didn't even have a business card I could snatch as a souvenir. But 18th Street had these way cool stickers. A sticker is something you give a child, and these made the child in me very happy. What's that line of Robert Frost's? "Weep for what little things could make them glad." 

     When I got my sticker home, I immediately put it in a prime location, on one of the Hon four-drawer black filing cabinets in my office closet. I never affix anything to those, but confidently  peeled off the back of this sticker and put it on, a memento of my perfect lunch at the 18th Street Brewery in Hammond, to which I extend my sincere congratulations. Excellence is never an accident. It takes a lot of thought and heart and work by a lot of people, and besides the money and success that often follow such effort, you also want someone to notice. I did.