Flashback 1995: Private Olive Still Everybody's Hero

Milton Olive III

    Sometimes when readers suggest topics, I get testy: thank you very much, but I am neither a lounge pianist nor a short-order cook. I don't take requests. 

     But Monday a reader offered an idea that could not be easily dismissed:
     "As you are aware, this is Black History Month and I would like to mention Olive-Harvey College in Chicago. Milton Olive was a young black man and Carmel Harvey was a young white man. They were both killed in Vietnam. Milton Olive fell on a grenade to save his buddies. Is there any way you can mention him? I would be very grateful if it can be done."
     Indeed it can. Not only do I know who Olive is, but I've written about him, a column I'm happy to post today, in an era sorely in need of heroes.

     Milton Olive III only had a second to react to the Viet Cong grenade that landed at his feet that October day in Vietnam in 1965. He yelled to the members of his platoon around him, something like, "Look out! Grenade!"
     Then the 18-year-old Chicago private bent over, picked up the grenade and hugged it to his abdomen, hunching over to shield his comrades from the blast that killed him instantly.
     He was the only Chicago African American ever awarded the Medal of Honor — the nation's highest award for bravery — and Sunday, 30 years to the day after his act of heroism in a war that so divided the country, about 60 people gathered at his memorial in Olive Park, Ohio Street and Lake Shore Drive, which was named for him. They invoked the legacy of the selfless paratrooper against the racial discord that now frequently divides the country.
     "He didn't pause and consider the number of ethnic and racial groups in his midst," said Jim Balcer, Chicago's director of veteran affairs. "He gave his life so that others could live."
     Rochelle Crump, of Chicago Veterans Advisory Council, said: "This should set a precedent for how we should live our lives today."
     The ceremony included a 21-gun salute, two color guards and the laying of wreaths at the plaque bearing Olive's Medal of Honor citation.
     Olive's first cousin Charles Carter spoke of the soldier everyone called "Skipper."
     "No one will ever know what went through Skipper's mind when he picked up that grenade," Carter said. "But he didn't stop to think he was saving the lives of African Americans or white men. They were comrades in arms . . . we hope Olive Park will become a symbol of racial harmony for Chicago."
     One comrade who couldn't attend, but nevertheless was thinking of Olive on Sunday, was former Capt. Jimmy Stanford. He was standing a few feet away when Olive grabbed the grenade.
     "I really didn't get to know the man until after he died," said Stanford, 60, from his home in Brazoria, Texas. "People often ask me why he did that. I really don't know — an extraordinary person. Something happens on the spur of the moment, and special individuals are there."
     Stanford agreed that Olive's actions carry a message of harmony.
     "That's one thing that combat does for you," he said. "You forget who's black, who's white, who's brown. There's no time for that."
     Stanford, father of four, grandfather of 12, great-grandfather of one, says he thinks a lot about the man who gave him the rest of his life at the cost of his own, a man of a different color, a man he barely knew. He urged others to remember Milton Olive, and his sacrifice as well.
     "Just don't forget him," said Stanford, fighting back tears.

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 23, 1995

Salad maker for the world

Terri Burnett

     Draped head to toe, from hairnet to shoe covers, Terri Burnett stands alongside dozens of similarly clad workers in a 37-degree room, grabbing handfuls of dark green spinach from a white trough and poking them into round clear plastic jars of pesto pasta hurrying past her on a conveyor line.
     What’s her job like?
     “It’s fun,” she said.
     “Fun?” How can that be?
     “They let you just do you. They let you just be calm,” said Burnett, 41. “There’s no rush. They let you work at a pace.”
     Nor is she uncomfortable.
     “I’m actually not cold,” she said, noting that when she first arrived, three years ago, she bundled up in layers. “You need two pair of pants on when you first start, or you won’t survive,” she recalled. But that passed, and now she gets by with a hoodie and small knit gloves.
     We’re on the South Side, in the assembly room at Farmer’s Fridge, a company that produces fresh salads — and meal bowls and desserts like chocolate chia raspberry pudding — nestles them into clear plastic jars and dispatches them across the country.
     Readers might recall I first tried their Harvest Salad during a few hours of idleness at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, noticed that it’s a Chicago endeavor, talked to founder Luke Saunders and was intrigued by the fact that the salads, with their fleeting shelf life are not produced at satellite plants around the country, but are all created in Chicago, at a single 100,000-square-foot production facility.
     Even though Midway Airport is literally across 54th Street, the perishables are not put on airplanes but trucked overland to 20 markets in Texas, California and the Northeast: 700 locations, not just their distinctive vending machines — there’s one just off the great hall at Union Station — but stores like Target and Jewel-Osco.

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The nick of all time

      

     “You cut yourself shaving.”
     Yes, yes I did. Six hours earlier, getting ready to go to the big get-to-know-each-other party for the Sun-Times and WBEZ staffs. I knew it was bad when I saw the blood running down my face and dripping into the sink.
     “So it’s noticeable, huh?” I said sheepishly. Was it ever. A triangular divot an inch long high on my right cheek. Vivisected during the deft, almost unconscious motions of plying the razor. I can truly say, in 45 years of shaving, I’d never managed a gash of that proportions. It wasn’t a nick; it was a wound.
     “You have lipstick on your cheek,” a friend said at the party said, floating the bright spin.
     Funny, my first thought had been of cosmetics. A few pats of my wife’s base and I’d be good to go. But she stopped wearing that years ago. And even if I found an old compact, people might notice. “Did you see Steinberg? Is he wearing makeup? He looks like Raggedy Andy.” They’ll assume I’m trying to seem young, like Gustav von Aschenbach in "Death in Venice," rouged and dyed, tripping down the Lido after Tadzio, his fading heart all aflutter.  No makeup.
     Next thought: maybe I should just stay home. Too soon to socialize anyway. Blame COVID.
     No, that's the coward's way. This could be repaired. Pressure, that’s the thing. I swabbed the raw skin with rubbing alcohol, then pressed a folded up pad of toilet paper against it, daubing the blood.
     “Is that a shaving cut?”
     “No, Jenn Kho kissed me,” I said, sarcastically, thinking: go with the lipstick notion. Then immediately feared the comment would come off, not as a glib party quip, but the sort of oblivious sexist remark that gets a man fired. Not joviality, but harassment of our executive editor. A harmless (I thought) face-saving jest morphing into some career-killing Hitchcockian nightmare. I’d end up running through a corn field while being strafed by a crop duster.
    “Just a shaving cut,” I said, quickly correcting myself, hoping it was not too late.

     At least it isn't just me. "Everyone’s just kind of rusty," New York Magazine concluded recently, surveying our current social mores. Public interaction is a skill and like most skills, you use it or lose it.
     Why do people go to parties? It certainly wasn’t convenient. Put myself in presentable shape, or try to. Take the 4:33 Metra downtown. Grab an Uber to Bronzeville. Here my plan hit a bump. Uber wanted $44. I had time. Preferring to spend $2.75 for the same journey, I hopped on the No. 1 bus at Canal and Jackson. Hopped off at 11th Street. Grabbed the Red Line at Roosevelt Road. Got off at 47th and leapt aboard a waiting 43rd Street bus.
     I'll be honest. Rumbling along 43rd Street, a certain out-of-placeness occurred to me. Maybe because it was dark outside. Perhaps, I wondered, this was not the best idea. At such moments I reassure myself by thinking of all those readers in Florida who get some kind of contact fear high from whiffing the vapors of crime wafting southward from Chicago. So afraid of the city, still, they’re ululating in fear, snug in their sunwashed deluxe senior living unit down in Margaritaville a thousand miles away. While I’m on a CTA bus crossing Indiana Avenue at night, safe as a clam. I read a book. Nobody on the bus mentioned my face. Nobody seemed to even look at me.
     “You could tell someone you fell and cut yourself,” someone at the party suggested. I shook my head. How is that better? I did not keep count how many pointed it out. Between five and 10. It wasn’t that every colleague said that. One broke away for the bar with, “Can I get you a drink?”
     “No thanks, I’m fine,” I said, and his face darkened as the realization struck him.
     “Oh gee, I’m sorry...” he said. “I mean, I forgot that you...”
     “No problem,” I said. “I’m good.”
     “A Coke. I could get you a Coke...” He continued in this vein for some time until I finally explained, “There’s nothing wrong with the offer. It’s all this stuff afterward that I could live without.” Which seemed almost harsh, so I added, soothingly: “I learned a long time ago you can’t stay sober because you don’t know how to get booze.” We both laughed at this and he fled from me like I was on fire. I took two steps and greeted a young reporter whom I hadn’t seen in three years.
     “I’m going to the bar," he replied. "Can I get you a drink?”
     “No thanks, I’m fine.”
     “Oh gee, I'm sorry....” he began, but I cut him off, practically grabbing him by the elbow and dragging him to the bar.
     “No, let me buy you a drink,” I said. “The big ass columnist buy the drinks...”
     On the bar was a large hexagonal glass urn dispensing lemon ice water, and I asked the bartender for a cup. She gave me one, and I held it under the spigot. A few drops dribbled out. A round slice of lemon had floated against the spigot, blocking the water. I shook the urn, without effect, then looked at the reporter, observing my struggles with a pitying eye, sucking his beer.
     "My whole life has been this way," I said. The bartender went to get a long wooden stick to nudge the lemon aside.
     Later, I circled around and noticed the friend who had imagined that gash could be lipstick. She was entertaining a group of young staffers and I slid over to join them. She was telling a funny story about some doofus who managed to pull a 7-foot tall bookshelf over onto himself, sending the whole newsroom running over to dig him out from under all the tumbled books.
     “And here he is now!” she exulted, or words to that effect, welcoming me into the grinning crowd with a sweep of her hand.

     If this all seems an unexpected combination of the trivial and personal, I should underline the moral of the story. In post COVID, while some people race to socialize, others hold back, and I figured, it’s good for you to know that, no matter how awkward a situation turns out to be, it could be worse, and you survive. I didn't get sick, nor crushed with shame. In fact, as you see here, managed to view it as amusing, eventually, which is key. Going to the party was worth the two trains and two buses needed to get there. I showed up, which is important in business. The night wasn’t a total loss. I mingled, ate a couple chicken tacos and half a slice of Portillo's chocolate cake, delivered several long diatribes to various bosses that I’m sure embarrassed me in ways no shaving mishap ever could approach. We all got bags of Dark Matter coffee heading out the door.
     My wife was asleep when I got home at 10:30. The next morning I thought I’d keep quiet — I can do that — and run an experiment and see if she noticed anything odd about my appearance.
     “You cut yourself shaving, dollie,” she said, as we both got ready for the train. “At least you’re going to be on the radio.” The “where no one can see you” was unvoiced.
     I told her the cut happened yesterday, before that party, and wondered why everybody feels the need to point it out. I certainly know it's there.
     “It’s what people say,” she said. “It’s on your face.”
     Yes, yes it is.
     I told her I hadn’t mentioned the cut to see if she noticed. She started to laugh.
     “I noticed it across the room!”

Northshore notes: Soulshine

By Caren Jeskey 

You are an ice covered twig
with a quiet, smiling sap
The spring winds of life
have tested your steel-blade soul
and the harsh breath of men
covered you with a frigid shell.
But under the transparent ice
I have seen your warm hand
ready to tear the shell
and grasp the love-sun’s heat,
and your cool morning eyes
look clear and calm into the day.
    — "Margrethe" by William Saphier

     As I lay on the ice the other day, I loosely wondered if people sitting in two parked cars overlooking Tower Road Beach might get concerned. Then I realized I didn’t really care — not as much as I needed to just be me, and spend some outdoor time scoring a session of free cryogenic freezing. Well, not quite the -250°F or so of a pricey cryo treatment. But at least a welcome infusion of eustress or “good stress.”
     It was Tuesday. The weather app said 9° with a colder windchill. Nonetheless, the blindingly bright sun and blue sky were an insistent invitation to get out there. Even with vitamin D supplements and two light-boxes (albeit seldom used) I’ve been having a mild case of SAD this season. I realized it during the first sunny day in over a month recently, when my body took on a life of its own, marched outside, and refused to go back in until sunset.

     Friends call my winter beach jaunts “sunbathing" even though the sun is usually hiding behind clouds. One old pal texted “have fun laying out,” which we did together in our adolescent years, baby oil mixed with reddish-orange iodine slathered onto our skinny bodies. We’d jumped on the bandwagon and used that particular bronzing formula as recommended by Joan Collins in her 1980 Beauty Book. We’d bring chaise lounges out onto a flat tar roof at my folks’ place, and bake away. Once I got so tan that it horrified me, and I remember calling Carson Pirie Scott in Skokie to ask someone at the Clinique counter if there was anything I could do to tone it down. All she could suggest was “moisturize.” Not too clever in my vanity. My father would implore us to get back inside like sane people. I recall him once braving blazing heat and sticky footsteps to come out to hand us an article about the dangers of skin cancer. That did not deter us. He has always had a good head on his shoulders, and we would have been wise to listen to him.
     I respect the ice and do not want to freeze to death. So I am careful not to venture out onto dangerous ice-shelves along Lake Michigan. On Tuesday I had carefully scrambled, in a low crouch, over layered wavy hills of frozen water that had formed over the sand, to get to the shoreline. There, rocks and fossils and lake glass patiently waited to be mined. My rock pick would have come in handy. Next time. The best I could do that day was pry a few out of the rock-hard sand and make a mental note to come back with the proper gear next time. Waders, a scoop, and those scuba-gloves I’ve been meaning to buy.
     That day sure paid off. After I'd picked up a few pieces, I laid down for a bit. I'd found some of the best glass yet, as well as cool pottery shards, and even a rock loaded with fossils fondly referred to as fossil soup. By the time you read this, the ice may be all nearly melted as we head into an unseasonably warm week. Perhaps see you at the shore.

“People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.”
      – Anton Chekhov

Gather in the newsroom for a brief meeting

     Harry Golden Jr. came striding into the fourth floor newsroom at 401 N. Wabash Ave. like a character from “Guys and Dolls.” The dean of the City Hall reporters, he looked sharp in a double-breasted pinstripe suit and well-shined shoes, the only jarring note his face, which looked like a skull. He was dying of cancer. We all knew it.

     Why is he still here? I remember wondering, slumped in a corner of the vast expanse of metal desks and stacked newspapers. Me, I’d be anywhere else but here.
     I was young, and newspaper ink hadn’t yet seeped into my bones. Wasn’t coursing through my veins like blood. Yet.
     The 75th anniversary of the first edition of the Daily Sun and Times was Thursday, and since even Stefano Esposito’s ambitious overview of our history could touch upon only a fraction of the reality, I hope you’ll forgive a few follow-ups, today and occasionally throughout the year.
     To have survived the Great Newspaper Die-Off and not only reach our diamond anniversary, but with the gift of a confident future, wedded to WBEZ, flush with new energy, money, talent and ambitions, is an occasion for joy and reflection.
     For me, on staff exactly half of those 75 years, thinking of the newspaper immediately conjures up colleagues long gone, answering the call to gather in the newsroom of memory. M.W. Newman drags in, rumpled, slump-shouldered, a dour man who wrote incredibly. In 1967, he described a killer hurricane this way: “Death came dancing and skipping, whistling and screaming, strangely still one second and whooshing and bouncing the next.” I never saw him smile.

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Flashback 2000: Elmer Gertz, 93, champion of liberal causes

Elmer Gertz (ST file photo)

     Sunday morning was spent chatting with my friend Robert Feder at a breakfast event at his synagogue. Our topic was my new book, but he also asked about obituaries, and I mentioned how useful they are as a portal into Chicago history. 

     I've posted many of my favorites, but this one has so far escaped republication. It came to mind recently because a friend joked that I am old enough to have known Leopold and Loeb (sigh, notorious "thrill kill" murderers whose 1924 slaying of a 14-year-old neighbor, Bobby Franks, and subsequent trial, horrified the public). I replied that no, wiseguy, I didn't. Though now that I think of it, I did know Nathan Leopold's lawyer, and had been to his apartment. Not Clarence Darrow, who saved Leopold's life and allowed him to go to prison. But the lawyer who got him out.  

     Elmer Gertz — lawyer, writer and intellectual gadfly, whose scholarly pursuits brought him into contact with some of the great figures of his day and whose legal work associated him with several notorious killers — died Thursday at 93.  
     He was best known for winning the 1958 parole of 1924 thrill-killer Nathan Leopold, and for defending Jack Ruby, the slayer of Lee Harvey Oswald. He became friends with both men, visiting Leopold in Puerto Rico and serving as a pallbearer at Ruby's funeral.
     Mr. Gertz also represented the author Henry Miller in the landmark 1963 Tropic of Cancer censorship case.
     He was a famous champion of liberal causes and a staunch opponent of the death penalty.
     "He was an inspiration. He was one of the reasons I went into law," said grandson Craig Gertz, 35. "He represented principles of justice and fairness that I can only hope to carry on in his name."
     Mr. Gertz was 25 when the first of his many books, "Frank Harris: A Study in Black and White," was written with Dr. A. I. Tobin. Rebecca West called it "a great book," and it was favorably reviewed by the likes of H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton and H. L. Mencken.
     Harris was only one of many prominent figures with whom Mr. Gertz, to his never ending pride, corresponded, from Winston Churchill, Clarence Darrow and Leon Trotsky to George Bernard Shaw and Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's lover. Harry Truman sent him more than 100 letters.
     He was born in Blue Island, near what was then 12th Street, the fourth child of Morris and Grace Gertz. His father, a Lithuanian immigrant, ran a clothing store at 39th and Cottage Grove; his mother died when he was 10. Growing up, he spent several years in orphanages, both in Chicago and Cleveland, with his father paying room and board, as was common then for motherless children.
     He attended more than a dozen schools, including Herzl elementary, where his classmate was future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg.
     He graduated from Crane Technical High School, then the University of Chicago. Inspired in part by the Sacco-Vanzetti case, he went to the University of Chicago Law School, receiving his degree in 1930.
     Mr. Gertz went to work as an assistant in the law firm of political fixer Jacob Arvey, where he worked 14 years.
     He had a role in Chicago's fair housing movement of the 1940s and 1950s, and was a champion of inclusion of African Americans in bar associations.
     Mr. Gertz was on Jack Ruby's defense team between 1964 and 1967, overturning his conviction for murdering Lee Harvey Oswald. But Ruby died before he could be retried.
     Mr. Gertz won election to the Illinois Constitutional Convention in 1969, and was chairman of its Bill of Rights committee.
     He received Israel's Prime Minister's Medal in 1972.
     After he was tarred as a criminal and a Communist by the John Birch Society, the libel lawsuit he filed took 14 years and reached the Supreme Court. The court's ruling in favor of Mr. Gertz extended protections against defamation.
     At the time of his death, he was a member of the adjunct faculty of John Marshall Law School and lived in East Lake View.
     He was a founder and past president of the Civil War Round Table, and also participated in the Shaw Society of Chicago, Public Housing Association and many other organizations.
     Survivors include a daughter, Margery Hechtman; son Theodore; six grandchildren; five great-grandchildren, and two brothers, Robert and George.
     Services are at 2 p.m. Monday at Weinstein Family Services, 111 Skokie Blvd., Wilmette. Burial follows at Memorial Park, Skokie.
          —published in the Sun-Times, April 28, 2000

Black history just won’t stay buried

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     Léopold Louis Philippe Marie Victor might seem an odd person to feature on the first day of Black History Month. He was white, spoke French and lived in Belgium. In fact, he was its ruler, King Leopold II.
     And while Black History Month has always been, quite clearly, American Black History Month, history is by nature expansive. Any honest inquiry should lead you down new and unexpected pathways. History is not restrictive, though you wouldn’t know it in Florida.
     I learned all about King Leopold in a shocking 1999 book called “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa” by Adam Hochschild.
     The little Americans know about Congo 125 years ago comes from lit classes teaching Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness,” whose claustrophobic horrors turn out to be nearly straight reportage. During the 23 years from 1885 to 1908 that Congo was the personal fiefdom of King Leopold — it belonged to the king, not to Belgium — an estimated 10 million Africans died, worked to death harvesting rubber, or slaughtered for resisting being enslaved, or from starvation after their villages were burned.
     What does any of this have to do with Chicagoans in 2023? A lot, actually. As jarring as the atrocities are — piles of amputated hands of Congolese who failed to gather their rubber quota, smoked over fires, so they can survive long journeys in the hot climate to collect a bounty — even more jarring, because it is so familiar, is the smokescreen of lies that Leopold sends billowing in all directions. At every step Africans are enslaved, their villages burned, their wives and children held hostage until they produce more rubber in order to acquaint them with Christian duty and the majesty of Western culture.
     If we simply must have an American hero in Black History Month debut, there’s a good one with the marvelous name George Washington Williams, “the first great dissenter.” He served in the U.S. Colored Troops of the Union Army, fought and was wounded during the Civil War, then lived an adventurous life that saw him a soldier in Mexico, a minister in Boston, a guest of President Benjamin Harrison and finally a visitor at royal court in Belgium.

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