Sidewalks: Silent killer of great oaks

Scott Carlini in the Cook County Forest Preserve.

     Scott Carlini rides west along Bloomingdale Avenue on a lovely mid-November day. At 79th Avenue, we detour south and park our bikes before a wide tree stump where the night before Carlini had penciled “White Oak” and “163 yo.”
     He points to the center of the stump.
     “Here’s the little tree, 160 years ago,” he says. “If you notice, the rings are really small here when the tree was young because it was in a crowded forest. Then in 1926, they came in here and cleared out the forest and started building some of these bungalows. Once the area was opened up to more light, then we’ve got the big rings, because it grew a lot faster.”
     Carlini knows trees, but then he’s spent years biking around Elmwood Park, neighboring suburbs and Chicago, trying to save trees, particularly ash, which he sometimes injects with his own formula of anti-emerald ash borer insecticide. Carlini cuts a distinctive figure: long hair, neon orange vest and stocking cap, Pall Mall cigarette often in one hand.
     “Oh boy, oh boy,” he says, sadly. “See here? Where they filed the roots away. That’s super bad. It’s stupid.”
     The white oak fell victim to a human ailment — the conviction that sidewalks must run straight.
     “In the old days, we used to move the sidewalk around it,” he says. “Normally this tree would have lasted another 200 years if it wasn’t damaged. But some sidewalk guy ground that away, and that’s not cool.”

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Flashback 2012: 'Who makes the public space public?'

     Rev. Phil Blackwell sent me an email from St. Louis, where he retired to be near his family. He was commenting on my infrastructure column, and recalled that I'd visited him at his residence atop the Chicago Temple downtown, doing research for my Chicago book. Alas, this description focuses more on the politics of the day, taken up with the pending NATO summit, and left out such details as the wood carving of Jesus regarding the Chicago skyline, circa 1955, in the "Chapel in the Sky."  Though I did snap a not-very-good photo. But he raises some interesting points, still current today.

     Serendipity led me to Rev. Phil Blackwell. I had heard that the Loop, which today is home to thousands, once had only one full-time resident: the minister of the First United Methodist Church, who lives in a three-story parsonage starting on the 22nd floor of the Chicago Temple, the quirky gothic structure south of Daley Plaza, with its "Chapel in the Sky" on the 25th floor.
     Interesting If True, as I like to say.
     I got in touch with Rev. Blackwell to see if he could shed some light, but he had something beyond Loop demographics on his mind, and invited me by his office, its leaded glass windows overlooking Daley Plaza.
     He handed me a typed message:

     "I have lived across the street from Daley Plaza for 10 years," it begins. "During that time I have seen and heard:
     "Tea Party protesters. War in Iraq objectors. Halloween clowns, Whirling Dervishes, Blackhawks celebrators, World Cup spectators, Christmas ornament purchasers, 21-gun salutes, children sliding down the Picasso, wedding couples being photographed at the fountain, movie casts playing their roles, people who are homeless sleeping on benches, farmers selling produce, gun violence opponents bowing in silence, hundreds of bicyclists ready to command the streets, blues, country, gospel, and jazz musicians, workers sunning at lunchtime, Sox fans rejoicing, sister-city promoters, creches, menorahs, and crescents and stars, and placard-carrying/bullhorn-proclaiming/marching stalwarts for most everything."

     Yet suddenly, he said, the city seems to be reconsidering if our rights will be respected.
     "Daley Plaza is the public square in Chicago," Rev. Blackwell said. "As the mayor and the City Council discuss circumscribing the people's use of the plaza during the summits coming in May and then extending the limitations indefinitely, the question is: Do they have any capacity for nuance? The first indication suggests that the answer is, 'No.'"
      The city insists that permits will be issued and rights respected. And while I want to believe them, we have seen an ominous shift in this country, from our president claiming the legal right to murder American citizens at his whim, to new laws that seem designed to help foreign potentates party in peace in Chicago. How ironic that, as other parts of the world protest toward new freedoms, we who are theoretically the most free try to limit protest and coin new punishments.
      "It's a major commitment for the city and the mayor to make, to host the G-8 and NATO summits," Rev. Blackwell said. "I understand how it would be advantageous for it to go well, to be picturesque, for the world to see Chicago as an international outlet and I hope that's the case. The gathering in Grant Park after Mr. Obama was elected, it was one of the most glorious portrayals of Chicago, and it erased, mainly, 1968 . . . But who makes the public space public? And who decides that? And when you say, you have to talk to the Realtors who oversee the use of the plaza, I say, 'Wait a minute. When does a real estate company determine public use?' What makes this square public? Free speech - is it free if you corral it and move it off at a distance where the speech is not heard by those to whom it was directed?"
     I thought of the Chinese, who made those wanting to protest the 2008 Olympics apply for permits, then arrested anyone who did.
     "All I'm saying is I think the issues raised by the summit are general issues," he said. "Is it possible for the city to orchestrate something where free space remains free, public space remains public, and the agenda of the groups meeting is accomplished and the city comes out like it knows what it's doing? I think everybody agrees with that. Can anybody actually think through this thing without it being a billy club moment?"
     The mayor's a smart guy, I said. Don't you think the city will be doing just that?
     "When it says the police chief can deputize people for service, I remember in the Vietnam War protests, construction workers on Wall street with wrenches wrapped in American flags, beating up protesters. Is that who you're going to deputize?"
     While waiting to see if the mayor would talk to me on this subject, I checked to see what he has said publicly so far.
     "Guys, it's not a big deal," Emanuel said, trying to deflect questions about his preparations. "This is a one-time event."
     That's scary, almost a challenge to fate. "A one-time event." That can be the title of the official inquiry report. So was the 1968 Democratic National Convention. A one-time event, mishandled, can last a very long time.
            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, January 11, 2012

COVID-19 brings out ‘resilience and valor’

Dr. Samantha Peterson

     In the spring of 2020, Franciscan Health Olympia Fields, like so many hospitals, was reeling under the onslaught of that first deadly wave of COVID-19. Patients gasping for air crowded the emergency room. Medical supplies ran low, treatment procedures changed by the hour, it seemed, with no vaccine in sight.
     In the middle of it was a young medical resident, Dr. Samantha Peterson. Her focus was family practice — those generalists treating everyone from newborns to the elderly for everything from colic to arthritis. But just then she happened to be doing her emergency medicine rotation.
     For two months, Peterson did nothing but treat COVID-19 patients.
     “Our numbers kept increasing,” Peterson recalled. “In the ER triage, all COVID patients had these biohazard symbols. In early March, there were a handful. By the end of March the entire ER was full of hazard symbols. I didn’t have a choice.”
     Peterson thought she didn’t have a choice. But more experienced doctors saw it differently, and some shied away from treating COVID-19 patients. The young intern ran in while others drew back.
     “We were a pretty hard hit hot zone hospital,” said Dr. Shanaz Azad, an infectious disease specialist leading the COVID-19 task force at Franciscan. “Sam Peterson was a medical resident. She really stepped up. I’d say 90 percent of the work Sam did, she volunteered to put her life in harm’s way. This is a novel virus. We didn’t know anything about it. She participated in the care of 2,000 COVID patients. She had no business seeing that many. This was all altruism. She was so inspired. So intense.”

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Radio days

      Monday's column mentioned the anticipated merger of the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ which, while it has been reported, still flew under the radar for some readers.
     "I missed that completely!" writes Robert Nanni. "I infer from your writing that you are in 
favor."     
     I wrote him back that indeed I am. While I haven't been on the station much in recent years, I've been reporting on WBEZ longer than I've been on the staff at the paper. When I was a mere egg, in my mid-20s, trying to find a fingerhold on Chicago media after being unceremoniously fired as the opinion page editor of the Wheaton Daily Journal, I started doing regular segments on Ken Davis' show, Studio A, beginning in January, 1986 when I was dubbed, with a healthy sprinkle of irony, their "World Correspondent" and spent most of that year wandering the world of Chicago, an assignment for which I was paid nothing—a reminder that the Internet didn't create the phenomenon of news organizations taking advantage of ambitious young people willing to work for free. The shtick was that once a week I would pop up on the phone in from someplace unexpected.
      My first broadcast was buck naked, from a sensory deprivation tank at Space Time Tanks on Lincoln Avenue—a fad at the time. I floated in total darkness atop warm, heavily saline water, waiting for the call. For about an hour, at one with the universe, an amoeba  on the calm surface of an antediluvian sea. Serenity settled in, just before the door ripped open, there was a blinding light and a draft of cool air, someone handed me a phone and Ken Davis asked me on live radio what I had been thinking the moment before he called.
     "That I ... had to go to the bathroom," I said, frowsily. "Wondering whether I should crawl out of the tank or wait until after you called."
      Somehow they liked it. The next week I broadcast from a pay phone at an early morning bar, Tiffany's, in Cicero, after a wake-up shot and a beer—such places were in the news at the time.          Other vignettes followed, almost random except they were all odd: watching a chicken being slaughtered at John's Live Poultry, its throat slit, the poor bird then dropped headfirst into a galvanized funnel, a thin stream of blood running out the bottom, it's claws scratching futilely on the metal. Northeastern's Human Performance Lab, checking in from a treadmill while undergoing a stress test. From Ragdale, the writer's colony in Lake Forest, where I had gone to finish a novel, a bit of which I obliviously read on the air. From the table of an acupuncturist. From the Playboy Club. That June, from inside the scoreboard of Wrigley Field during a game. Looking at the enormous water cooling system in the attic of the new State of Illinois Building.
     Being live radio, my segment didn't always work. For April Fool's Day, I tried to do a broadcast that was from an entirely white room, supposedly, which struck me as a clever idea. But it fell flat. A few weeks later, I was in the lab of a Chinese engineer working to turn moon dust into concrete for NASA, but the laboratory's switchboard didn't put the call through. To top it off, I walked outside and found I had locked the keys in my car. I was 25. I had to return the following week.
     The broadcasts became so routine that some days I merely noted "WBEZ broadcast" or "WBEZ" in my 1986 Waterstone's Literary Diary. 
     Once Ken phoned me at some ungodly hour—3 in the morning say—and ran a tape. I was so composed, talking with him, that listeners later thought I must have had advanced warning. But I didn't. I was just quick-witted and willing to play along. Still, as the efforts of the young so often do, the whole effort really didn't go anywhere, and eventually we parted ways and I went into newspapering, which paid far better. Some people get their foot in the door and become David Sedaris. Others become, well, me. Still, I remember it being fun, and kept going back to WBEZ over the years—for a while, Eric Zorn and I were regulars on Fridays, recapping the week's news. I know we were hoping to become a cherished radio item, but that never happened either. Given that track record, I can't imagine the station is tapping its foot waiting to get me back on the air, not that I would let that stop me. What's the T.S. Eliot line? About those "who are only undefeated/Because we have gone on trying." Yes, something like that.

Journey back to paper’s rocky past

     I’ve only glimpsed the back of my neck once in the past year and a half. Once is plenty. It happened by accident in the fall of 2020, in a chair at Great Clips. I thought: Better prepare the barber for a shock.
     “Spinal surgery. A C3-7 laminoplasty,” I said. “I’ve never summoned the courage to look at it.”
     “Here, I can help with that,” the barber said cheerily, angling the handheld mirror so I could see.
     Oh. It looked like somebody planted an ax in the back of my neck. Good thing I had to sit in the chair while my hair was cut. Even then, I was somewhat shaky walking away. Not a little-unsteady shaky. But I-hope-I-don’t-keel-over shaky. I never looked again.
     Despite the jarring sight, it was still good to be reminded. There is a certain amazed pride in surviving an ordeal. I sometimes say to my wife, out of the blue: “I still can’t believe that happened.”
     It’s a handy phrase when processing difficulties. Like nearly two years of COVID craziness, or the Jan. 6 insurrection. It doesn’t mean I doubt the reality — far too much of that already. Rather, it’s like a slow whistle of appreciation, almost awe. Wow, remember that? Did that really happen? Amazing.
     That line came to mind reading Cyrus Freidheim’s new book, “Commit & Delivery: On the Frontlines of Management Consulting.”
     Not a book I would typically pick up. A management guide, filtered through the soft focus of retirement. But its author used to be CEO of the Sun-Times and gave me a copy. “Commit & Delivery” shares Freidheim’s business wisdom culled at places like Chrysler, United Airlines and Amoco.

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Flashback 1997: In the chips at Jays

Tom Howe, at the Jays potato chip factory in 1997 (Photo by Rich Hein for the Sun-Times)

     Twitter gets a bad rap, and rightly so, what with all its helping fascists spread lies and undermine democracy. But Twitter does have value. I was just wondering what to post today when I noticed a tweet by Natalie Y. Moore, WBEZ correspondent and author (I've read her book, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation; it's excellent). She was waxing nostalgic: "My all-time favorite field trip as a kid was visiting the Jays potato chip factory. We got paper hats and free chips at the end."  Small world. My all-time favorite visit-to-a-factory story was going to Jays.

      I liked this, not just for the chips that I too got at the end (no paper hat, alas). But, because after absorbing the complicated clamor of a factory, with its complicated assembly lines and industrial processes, I realized what Jays' biggest challenge was: getting the chips from Point A to Point B, unbroken. 

     Jays went out of business in 2007, but the brand lives on, purchased by Snyder's. 

     A potato chip is a delicate thing. Fragile. A pound of pressure will crush it. So when you're moving 250 tons of chips through your plant, as they do every day at Jays Foods, you need to have a system.
     "You don't buy potato crumbs, you buy potato chips," said Tom Howe, CEO and co-owner of the Chicago company, at 99th and Cottage Grove. Jays makes 125 different types and brands of chips and several hundred varieties of popcorn, puffs, twists, pretzels and assorted bagged munchies.
     Jays combats the tendency of potato chips to crush into flinders with a variety of conveyer belts, radial filling chutes and gently vibrating slides, where masses of chips, a yard deep, are gradually massaged forward, the outer layer of chips shearing away like the face of a glacier.
     The raw material is far easier to handle. An entire semi-trailer of sturdy North Dakota "chipping" potatoes can be emptied in a matter of minutes, by backing the trailer onto a hydraulic lift, tilting it 45 degrees and letting the potatoes—grown for their thin skins and low moisture—tumble out.
     About a dozen semi-trailers' worth of potatoes arrive every day. The potatoes are immediately separated into big and small sizes for a purpose both reasonable and extraordinary: Big potatoes make big chips that go into large bags; small potatoes make small chips for lunch-size bags.
     "Nobody wants to open a small bag and find three big potato chips in it," Howe said.
     Computers keep track of everything, shunting potatoes to 15,000-pound holding bins. Each bin feeds into a pipe containing a turning screw—a version of the ancient Archimedes screw used to pump water—that moves the potatoes from the bin to conveyer belts, to where they are washed and skinned, the skin scrubbed off by metal bristle brushes.
     No machine can detect if a potato is rotten inside. So a pair of human inspectors reach into the passing brown parade and give the potatoes a quick squeeze. Occasionally, they snatch one and slice it open, usually revealing black areas of rot, a skill they attribute to experience.
     "I know," said Alicia Jimenez, asked to explain what about a potato tips her off to slice it open and find rot.
     The naked potatoes are sent into high-speed chippers—spinning brass rings, each with eight blades inside, straight blades for straight chips, ripple blades for ripple chips.
     The blades cut the potatoes, but the potatoes take their revenge. Every three hours the blades are dulled and the line must be stopped so the old rings can be replaced by new rings with sharpened blades.
     The sheer quantity of slicing spews big foamy banks of starch from either side of the chipper, which calls to mind a washing machine gone berserk.
     Potato chips account for about 55 percent of Jays' business. Older Chicagoans might remember the chips were called "Mrs. Japp's Potato Chips," for the wife of Leonard Japp Sr., who founded the company in 1927.
     Then came Dec. 7, 1941. Two days after Pearl Harbor, Japp's was changed to Jays—no apostrophe, since there is no "Jay."
     "They recognized it was not in vogue to call something 'Japp,' " Howe said.
     The raw chips spend three minutes cooking in hot corn oil, which is constantly circulated and filtered. Then they are salted, and flavorings—barbecue, for instance, or sour cream and onion, are added.
     After the chips are fried, there is another quality check, in which women pluck burned and deformed chips out of the masses passing by. The chips are conveyed on a link grid, wide enough to let broken chips fall through.
     The chips also are laser-inspected, rushing, in a single layer, over a complex device called an Opti-Sort Scanner. Chips with dark spots or holes are detected by a laser, which instructs one of 82 small tubes to fire a puff of air that knocks the substandard chip off the line, into a discard bin.
     The discards—about 3 percent of production—are gathered up and used: Starch is drawn out and sold to cornstarch makers; the rest goes to hog feed. Just as the stockyards were said to use every part of the pig but the squeal, at Jays every part of the potato is used but the rich, earthy smell.
     Jays even tried to sell burnt chips to the public once, about 20 years ago. "Consumers kept telling us they liked the brown chips," said Len Japp Jr., recalling the "Brownies" variety. "It went over like a lead balloon." Japp and his father, now 93 and honorary chairman of the board, sold the company to Borden in 1986. "They almost ruined it," Howe said, citing a slump in product quality and neglect of the Jays distribution system. "They lost the connection with the consumer."
     By 1994, Jays was on the rocks and the Japps, allied with Howe, bought the company back. "Not too many people have a second chance in life," said Japp, whose children are in the company.
     Getting the chips in the bags is another challenge: You can't just fill up bags and seal them; the chips would be smashed. Rather, a conveyer pours chips -- gently -- on the central hub of a large, wheel-like device, where the chips scatter into 15 buckets that are, basically, scales. A computer monitors the weight of each bucket and opens up the exact combination that, in this case, will fill a 14-ounce bag. The bags are packed into boxes that read: "HANDLE LIKE EGGS."
     While not exactly perishable, potato chips do have a shelf life of about eight weeks, only one day of which is spent at the plant.
     "Potatoes that are in this morning will be in our branches tomorrow morning, ready to hit the streets," Howe said. Jays is still a regional brand, sold in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Missouri. But business has grown 50 percent in the past two years.
     "We connect to people's lifestyle," Howe said. "People treat themselves with Jays. We're in the fun food business."

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 26, 1997

Ravenswod Notes: Free Bird

"Lady Murasaki Sets a Bird Free from a Cage," by Yashima Gakutei (Met)

 

    

     It's probably telling that while Ravenswood bureau chief Caren Jeskey writes at the start of the day, as you will see, I do my most regular writing at night. Not the writing here, mind you—writing for public consumption benefits from the freshness of the morning. But my journaling comes, usually, in the evening, with few flights of fancy or deep thoughts, but a dull just-the-facts plod through what happened that day. I do that because in a year or five or 10, I might want to know some specific, and there it will be. 

     "You have lingered sweet, between our hearts, like an everlasting soul.” 
     I’m not sure where this came from; I found it written in the jacket of one of my hundreds of pages of journals and I like the ring of it. Over the years I’ve gone through periods of fastidious daily writing. I’ve also had times where I forget how important it is for the ink to meet the paper. Or I was too distracted, defeated, or exhausted to lift that pen and tend to my inner garden.
     Writing is a way we can get to know ourselves and the world. Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’s Way, teaches a daily exercise she calls Morning Pages. Per her instruction, when I was disciplined enough to do so, I’d roll out of bed each morning (maybe after a quick run to the loo), sit up, and spill three full pages of stream-of-consciousness musings onto the blank 8x10 sheets of lined paper. When I took the time to do this, years ago, I found that my innermost fears and hopes revealed themselves. Dreams were recalled in vivid detail, the mind fresh from sleep. Realizations and epiphanies abounded. The practice is to write non-stop, even if a sentence or two reads “I have nothing to write.” The goal is not to create a quality product, it’s to unveil what is hidden in the corners and crevices of the psyche.
     I am not a fan of repression, nor of passive aggressive behaviors that stem from inner (often unrecognized) anger or pain that becomes a puppet master if not unsupervised.
     The father of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) Dr. Aaron Beck died earlier this month at the age of 100. He contributed an invaluable piece to the puzzle as far as helping sentient beings (who sometimes forget that we are sentient, as we numb ourselves through various means) learn to hear their inner voices. There is usually an element of criticism in these voices.      We judge ourselves and others, rather than focusing on our permanent values and goals. Once the messages are unveiled, we can learn to decipher the thoughts and beliefs that hold us back. Through CBT we can shut the mean person inside of us down when needed in order to move forward, take risks, and act courageously despite core beliefs that would prevent us from success and greater happiness. We can be our own worst enemies, or we can thrive by reparenting ourselves in gentle and loving ways that dispel the myths about ourselves that a patriarchal, shaming, unrealistically puritanical, capitalistic, materialistic society places upon us.
     I’m a nostalgic person who has a hard time letting go. I sometimes feel regretful about opportunities I’ve squandered, and other mistakes I have made. Through CBT I’ve learned to be more accepting of my decisions and of myself, warts and all. I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’ve always done the best I could with the tools I had, and I often fell short because the toolbox was near empty. I can also celebrate the many successes I've had, and I'm shedding the idea that I need to be better than I am while also striving to improve.
     A cool, middle aged white haired hippy-ish man, an Austinite who works at Book People, a two story mecca where one can get lost for days, turned me onto a book called Taming Your Gremlin. He said it helped him hear his inner critic and say adieu to some of it. Clients have experienced their inner critic to sound like their own sometimes; other times it’s their mother’s, father’s, or a punitive nun or another authoritarian, judgmental person. The voice is mean, not inspiring or helpful. It does not say “you are valuable. You are good enough the way you are. You are lovable. You are safe.” (Why is Stuart Smalley suddenly coming to mind?) It says “You are a disappointment,” or some variation. The voice is not true. It’s not even yours.

A free bird leaps

on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

            —Maya Angelou