Works in progress: Cate Plys

     Caren Jeskey stepping up to pinch-write on Saturdays helped the EGD community to see many things. For me, it became clear that there is a benefit to a weekly breather, both to myself and to the readers: a different perspective, a palate cleanser after six days of Neil-Neil-Neil-Neil-NEIL-Neil. So when Caren decided to step away and start an audio blog (which you can find here) my first thought was that I should keep the tradition of Somebody Else Saturday going.

     But how? With whom? 

     Luckily, I know many creative folk, few longer and none better than my Northwestern classmate, Cate Plys. We were on the college humor magazine together, and have been close friends ever since. She's had a wide-ranging career — columnist at the Chicago Reader, the  Sun-Times and Tribune, and more. Since October, 2021, she's been exploring the complex world of "Roseland, Chicago: 1972." I invited her to tell you about it. In coming weeks, I'll turn Saturday over to other friends with interesting projects. If you'd like to nominate yourself, you know where to find me. Take it away, Cate:

     Thanks, Neil!
     Full disclosure, I can’t quit Neil, and vice versa, because he came to my Gramma’s house in Hegewisch for Thanksgiving in 1982. That, and we know where each other’s bodies are buried.

     “Roseland, Chicago: 1972” started as the serialized story of Steve Bertolucci, a 10-year-old Roselander in 1972, and what becomes of him. But Roseland, Chicago, and 1972 — they all demanded more. They got it. I’m just a girl who can’t say no.
     The thing is Steve and his friends live in a strange world called 1972, a place so far removed from 21st century Chicago that even those of us who once dwelt there may barely recognize it when we catch a brief glimpse of it now, whisking around a corner or disappearing into a crowd, always just out of reach.
     I was there. I saw it. But the more I wrote, the simplest things began to feel like science fiction in reverse. I had to ask myself: Would anyone who wasn’t there believe it?
     It was a brave old world:
     Every expressway into Chicago was guarded by a massive set of neon red lips, looming 80 feet in the air on black steel pylons, blinking electronic messages underneath like “Celebrate National Secretary’s Week!” and “Happy Birthday, Eddie Barrett!” The Dan Ryan lips, which Steve’s family passed on rare car trips downtown, kept vigil over the city at 85th Street.

     Chicagoans believed in God and the devil so viscerally that when “The Exorcist” played here to massive crowds in ’73, Tribune film critic Gene Siskel saw a teenage boy faint at one showing. Six more terrorized teens retreated to the lobby, one literally trembling for a full half hour.
     Knowledge was distributed to the people each morning and afternoon by young boys who threw onto their front porches folded wads of cellulose which had been boiled, mashed, and flattened into sheets later embedded with information. These were called “newspapers,” and everybody read them. Everybody. Even kids like Steve.
     Who’d believe kids used to read newspapers? Yesterday I saw two parents pushing a stroller. The approximately 18-month-old child seated inside was clutching an iPhone with both hands, focused on it to the exclusion of all else.
     I realized I’d have to persuade readers that the 1972 world had, in fact, existed. Marshal the evidence. So Steve’s story became an immersive project on Substack for anyone who’s game enough to take a dunk in 1972. To start, each chapter is followed by Chapter Notes explaining points of interest covered, ranging from MAD Magazine  to Jays potato chips.
     Optional Chicago History Chapters delve deeper into places, people and pop culture as they emerge in the story, so far including the Wrigley Building, Chicago before it was Chicago, and a look at Chicago newspapers circa 1972.

     For those brave enough to jump in the deep end without a lifeguard, there are two additional sections to explore: THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972, and Mike Royko 50+ Years Ago Today. As I warn readers on the About page, however, enter at your own risk. No sensitivity reader has combed through any of it. 1972 isn’t a safe space--though frankly, neither is any other year with which I am familiar.
      TCD 1972 goes through the year week by week, pulling fascinating pieces out of all five of Chicago’s daily 1972 newspapers. This material is the news--and so to a great extent the reality--that Steve and everyone he knew swam in. If you dip a toe into the roiling 1972 waters regularly, the first cold shock of sexism, racism, and teenagers getting expelled for long hair begins to wear off. You get used to the water, you see beyond the splashing, and you start to feel what the world looked like to 1972 Chicagoans.
     And the letters are hilarious.

     Why Royko? 1972 newspapers are peanut butter, and Mike Royko is the chocolate that elevates the peanut butter into a delectable treat. You can have one without the other, but why would you? Royko dominated the Chicago newspaper landscape in a way that can’t be overstated, and uniquely in the city’s history.
     Also, 10-year-old Steve’s family subscribed to the Daily News. That meant they got an afternoon newspaper thrown on their front porch by a paperboy, and the first thing a Daily News reader did was open the paper to page three and read Royko in a long, thin column next to the fold.
     Each Royko 50+ covers a week of columns, pulling the best quotes and providing the sociopolitical context that Mike’s contemporaneous readers brought to his work--so you’ll even get the inside jokes. For instance, Mike’s column from September 19, 1972:  

     Mike proposed a new statue for the Civic Center Plaza—now Daley Plaza—which was already home to the Picasso. Mike’s statue idea was based on two recent news events he assumed his readers knew all about. First, the city and its newspapers were going nuts over the recent announcement that Marc Chagall would create a huge piece of public art for the First National Bank plaza, rivalling the nearby Picasso.
     Second, the Better Government Association (BGA) had just completed a hilarious investigation with the Daily News in which reporters followed CTA workers around and documented their busy work days. The pièce de résistance was a worker named Tad, photographed on the clock carrying five cases of beer from a liquor store to his CTA truck.
     Mike's readers had all seen the BGA's picture of Tad in the Daily News — it would have been like a viral Tik Tok video. Mike's column, then, only included Tad's statue, created by the paper's art department. For Royko 50+, I hunted down Tad's original infamous picture so readers today can see him in all his glory, compare with Tad's statue, and appreciate Mike's delicate wit:
     “Before all of our downtown plazas are covered with great works of art by Picasso, Chagall and other international artists, we should set one aside for a statue that would have meaning to Chicagoans,” wrote Mike. “Unlike our famous Picasso, there can be no confusion about who Tad is and what he is doing: He is a man carrying five cartons of beer….It is inspirational, because most of us would like to have a job in which carrying one armload of beer gives us our daily sweat. But the fact is, most of us don’t have the gumption to get out there and find a city job that allows us to flop down and rest.”     

     As I recall, Mike Royko threatened to break Neil’s legs once (editor's note: he did, and not in a joky, "ha-ha, I'll break your legs fashion" but in a "next time asshole I'll break your fucking legs" fashion), or something like that. I cover extra-column Royko doings in a Weekend Edition, and we’ll have to get Neil’s story in there soon.

     Lastly, sometimes an item in the news or Mike Royko sends us down an unexpected Chicago History Rabbit Hole, and then anything can happen. Take Mike’s February 25, 1972 column, in which Mike gets a tip that a has-been mobster named Louis Tornabene is scheduled for a small-time hearing at the Chicago Avenue police court. Mike shows up to mock Tornabene, because he used to be a tough guy running a mob strip joint called Eddie Foy’s, and now he’s a used car salesman.
     This rabbit hole leads us through FBI wire transcripts to the seedy strip joints that used to line the South Loop streets, on to one of the most famous entertainers of the late 19th century-early 20th century, and finally to the worst single-building fire in U.S. history, the Iroquois Theatre fire. That’s all thanks to Mike mentioning Eddie Foy’s, seen here in its 1950’s-60s heyday courtesy of John Chuckman’s Photos on Wordpress.

     Come over some time and take a stroll in 1972. It’s easier to appreciate when you can get out any time you want.

Amara Enyia is fighting all problems everywhere

Amara Enyia in Geneva.

     If you are unaware, as I was, that we are nearing the end of a 10-year global initiative to spotlight concerns of special importance to Black people, don’t feel bad. Some efforts get more attention than others.
     “The United Nations designated 2015 to 2024 as the International Decade for People of African Descent, all around the world,” said Amara Enyia. “This is a mechanism designed to deal with all of the issues: climate, inequality, education. Part of this is doing a lot of advocacy.”
     Regular readers might remember my spending a day on the campaign trail with Enyia when she faced Rahm Emanuel in 2014.
     “Unlike the typical marginal eccentric who feels compelled to run against a powerful if not popular Chicago mayor, she is neither a crank nor a fool, but a thoughtful, grounded community activist,” I wrote, “one of six children of Nigerian immigrants, whose only obvious sign of unbalance is the apparently sincere belief that she will defeat the mayor in February.”
     She didn’t win. Unlike most former mayoral candidates, she did not utterly vanish. She tried again in 2019 and recently popped up in Geneva serving as chairwoman for the international civil society working group at the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent.
     Most of us have enough trouble dealing with one problem in one place; Enyia is trying to address all problems everywhere.
     “You’re essentially dealing with all of the languages, all of the geographies, prioritizing issues, working to make it as impactful as possible,” she said. “It’s a pretty significant undertaking.”
     It is? It seems to me the woes of the world barrel onward, bursting through the paper barriers of working groups and multinational programs.
     Enyia disagrees. She thinks it is important that Black people in America understand that the problems disproportionately affecting them in this country are also afflicting their brothers and sisters around the globe.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 1994: Ina Pinkney Offers True Partnership

Ina Pinkney

    On Tuesday I ran a profile of Bill Pinkney, the first Black sailor to circumnavigate the world alone. It seems fitting to follow up with the sidebar about his wife at the time, Ina, extraordinary in her own right. After today's profile, we'll catch up with what Ina's up to lately.

     Bill Pinkney might have never gone to sea, never lived his dream, never become a role model, if it weren't for the effervescent whirl of joyous energy also known as his wife, Ina Pinkney.
     "We have an obligation as a partner to encourage the people we love to be all they can possibly be," says Pinkney, explaining what must strike many married people as a riddle of intractable mystery: how their relationship not only permitted, but encouraged him to go to sea for two years. "When people say how could you let him go sailing, I said I didn't let him do anything. I helped him going sailing. I didn't let him go. So, we have had a very different philosophy about what it means to be partners in this life."
     In some circles, Ina is the more famous Pinkney. "I'm Ina Pinkney's husband," laughs Bill Pinkney, recognizing that, for fans of dense, well-made desserts and hearty breakfasts, her Ina's Kitchen, on West Webster, is a more notable achievement than any mere boat trip.
     She was Brooklyn-born Ina Brody, a 22-year-old shop clerk, when she met Pinkney in a Greenwich Village cafe in 1965. It was love at first sight.
     They married a few months later. No one from her family attended the wedding of the bi-racial couple. "Total rejection," she says.
     She never had an interest in sailing. "I packed him great lunches, said `Have a good day, honey.' But I never, never felt the pull," she says.
     She does not want anyone to mistake her openness about his trip for indifference. She missed him "desperately" while he was away and worried about his well being.
     She taped hundreds of hours of television and shipped the tapes to his next port of call. She made him pillows of varying fabrics so he could feel different tactile sensations on the long, dulling voyage. Each day, without fail, she made a tape of the events of the day and sent those to him as well.
    "I was concerned about sensory deprivation more than anything," she says.
     While Bill was pursuing his dream, Ina pursued hers. "I always wanted to have a breakfast restaurant," she says, of the restaurant she opened with partner Elaine Farrell, who had been a customer of her bakery. Ina's Kitchen just celebrated its third anniversary. In addition to supporting her husband's future plans, she has a Bill Pinkney project of her own in mind.
     "I want very much to have a street named after him," she says. "I think Monroe right down to the harbor, where the boat was, would be Captain Bill Pinkney Drive. I want to do that."
          –Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 30, 1994

     I reached out to Ina Pinkney for an update. She replied:

     The BREAKFAST AT INA’S documentary about my closing screened in 48 film festivals after the world premier at Chicago’s International Film Festival. I was invited to 31 of them.

     My cookbook tour was terrific especially through the Jewish Book Council.
     I spoke for clients at food conferences about breakfast.
     As a polio survivor, I travel and zoom to speak at Rotary Clubs nationally about the late effects of polio finally acknowledged as Post-Polio Syndrome. I now chair a global advocacy group for survivors.
     After breaking my polio leg in December 2018, and surgery, I’m a wheelchair/scooter user now.
     My world and life are different but not smaller.
     And on April 26th, about 50+ chefs will have an 80th Birthday Bash Fundraiser for me for my favorite charities…Pilot Light and Green City Market.

Dancing into a minefield

Suzanne Lopez, left, talks with two dancers at the Joffrey Ballet rehearsal space on Randolph.

     Plays have scripts that tell actors what words to say, plus occasional stage directions, indicating how to deliver a certain line or when to move in a particular direction — the most famous being Shakespeare’s notation in Act III of “A Winter’s Tale”: “Exit, pursued by a bear.”
     Music has chains of notes representing various pitches and durations, with extra instructions delineating whether they be played loud or soft, fast or slow.
     But how do ballet dancers know where to step?
     There are videos, of course, and a complex system known as Benesh Movement Notation, resembling notes on a scale. Neither works particularly well.
     “I can tell when someone learned off an audition video,” said Suzanne Lopez, one of two choreography directors from the Joffrey Ballet for “Anna Karenina,” opening at the Civic Opera House on Wednesday. As for the notation system, “It takes years of learning how to do that,” she said, “and I’m not qualified.”
     So how does a troupe learn a new ballet? Surprisingly, the way dancers are taught their steps in the 21st century has much in common with the way bards were taught to recite “The Iliad” in ancient Greece.
     “It needs to be person-to-person,” said Lopez. “It needs to be passed down. Copious notes. I have a giant binder for ‘Anna Karenina,’ constantly updating.”

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 1994: Man Who Sailed Around World Looks Toward His Next Journey

     In Sunday's post about Paul Vallas, I mention Bill and Ina Pinkney, both profiled years ago. I'm posting Bill's today, and Ina's on Thursday.  This is a long piece, 1900 words. The paper used to do that sort of thing. But if you soldier on until the end, I'll give an update on what Bill is up to today.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun? . . .
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
         — Langston Hughes, 1951

     Bill Pinkney does not lead a life of quiet desperation. He does not race with the rats. His nose is not to the grindstone. His dream, undeferred, did not dry up like a raisin in the sun.
     Pinkney wanted to sail around the world, and did so, two years ago, becoming the third American — and the first African American — to make the trip solo while rounding all five major Southern capes.
     But the story does not end there. At age 59, Bill Pinkney says he is just warming up. He sees new challenges, like distant sails on the horizon, approaching in his future.
     "I could never be the person I was before I left," says Pinkney, dapper in a black silk shirt, new jeans and tasseled loafers. "No way. Never. People say, `Oh, Bill, how are you doing now that you're back in the real world?' No, no, I left the real world to come here. This is not real - " he gestures to his near West Side loft, with its shelves of books and walls of awards. "This is manufactured. . ."
     While he is looking ahead, the nearly two years he spent circumnavigating the globe are still very fresh with him.
     "I'll give you an example of real," he continues. "A 50-foot wave breaking behind your boat. There is nothing more real than that, not your mortgage payment, not whether or not your American Express bill is paid. That's not real."
     Captain Pinkney — the title is not an honorific, but refers to his Merchant Marine 100-ton captain's license — relives his adventure, in motivational speeches before groups ranging from major corporations to public school classrooms. He has written an illustrated children's book, Captain Bill Pinkney's Journey and a $39.98 video, narrated by Bill Cosby, has just been released.
     The bare facts of his journey have the power to amaze. He covered 27,000 nautical miles over 22 months, 16 of which were spent at sea, alone, aboard a 47-foot yacht. He faced 50 mile-per-hour winds and 30-foot waves. Yet, with hindsight, he views the journey as a peaceful, almost boring time.
     "Seventy-five percent of the voyage was quite enjoyable and rather uneventful," he says, pointing out that half the battle was careful attention to preparation and a sailor's caution. "Most of the time when you hear of great disasters, it's because the expedition was planned and executed poorly. Rarely do experienced seamen really get caught in bad conditions."
     But friends say that Pinkney is just being modest.
     "If you know anything about sailing, it's a hellish, hellish proposition," says fellow sailor Morris Bleckman. "There's one leg (of the round-the-world trip) about 61 days, by himself. It's not for the fainthearted. Single-handed sailing demands more from anybody else than any other sport. You depend entirely on your own wits and your own guts and nothing else."
     Asked anything he would do differently, Pinkney mentions trifles — having; a refrigerator would have been nice. But as far as his own performance, he surprised even himself.
     "I found my capabilities were greater than I thought," he says. "You really never know these sort of things about yourself until you are pressed."
     Little of Pinkney's life would, at first glance, seem to have pointed him toward his epic journey. He grew up in the neighborhood of 33rd and Indiana, "what at that time was known as Bronzeville," he says, accenting the word in what sounds like contempt. "My father was a houseman, a male domestic. He and my mother got divorced when I was a small child."
     He grew up, at times on welfare, and graduated from Tilden Tech in 1954. Like so many adventurous young men, Pinkney went to sea with the Navy, where he worked as an x-ray technician. He loved it, served eight years, and might still be there today if it weren't for the racism common in the Navy.
     "The only reason I got out of the Navy is they wouldn't give me a commission," he says. "They weren't interested too much in giving blacks commissions in the 1950s."
     Back in civilian life, he worked at a variety of jobs — in a hospital, as a bartender, elevator repairman and limbo dancer in Puerto Rico, where he moved on a whim. Relocating to New York in the early 1960s, he decided he was tired of x-rays and trained as a makeup artist, working as a freelancer on commercials and movies. He met and married his wife and together they sailed remote-control sailboats on the pond in Central Park.
     Pinkney eventually moved into the corporate cosmetic business, launching brands aimed at African Americans, first for Revlon, then for Johnson Products.
     Revlon transferred him back to Chicago in 1974, where he hooked up with Flash Cab founder Arthur Dickholtz, who served as his sailing mentor.
     The idea of sailing around the world began to gel for Pinkney in the mid-1980s, as he set out on the daunting task of taking an indistinct dream and making it real.
     The assumption is that anyone who sails yachts must be a wealthy man. But Pinkney had only limited resources, and to make his dream real he first had to find corporate support. On his side were two lures: not only would the voyage generate publicity, but Pinkney devised an ambitious plan to involve thousands of schoolchildren in his journey, communicating with them via satellite and using his trip to teach math, geography, history and science. Still, it was a hard sell.
     "I had 30,000 kids every day for two years for $375,000 (the cost of the trip) — you couldn't buy them a piece of bubble gum on that kind of money," he said. "But an Anheuser-Busch, a Quaker Oats, couldn't see the value of that."
     Chicago educator Iva Carruthers helped Pinkney craft his proposal, though not without initial reservations.
     "I said, `Bill, you're absolutely crazy,' " remembers Carruthers, a professor at Northeastern Illinois University, who told him to meet her at her office at 8 a.m. the next Monday in the hopes that he wouldn't show up.
     "When I got in, he was already there, waiting for me," she says. "He started sharing with me his dream. It became clear to me that all he was asking me to do was write a proposal, and that if he was willing to risk giving up his life alone at sea, I could certainly do what comes easy to me."
     Industrialist Armand Hammer could, too, and contributed $25,000 in seed money. But full sponsorship was not forthcoming. Pinkney approached some 300 different companies over a period of two years. All rejected him. Particularly galling to Pinkney were rejections from two categories he thought should be eager to support him — black-owned corporations and the makers of marine products. In the end, the crucial money came from a Boston financier named Todd Johnson.
     Pinkney feels he was at a disadvantage because of the perception that black people aren't sailors. It is a thought that sends him hurrying to his bookshelves to refer to volumes documenting black seamen, flipping pages to show photos of ship's records listing black crews.
     "The assumption is . . . black people don't sail," he says. "Nothing is further from the truth. Look at the history of our country. We are a maritime nation, and (black people) have been part of the maritime history of this country from before it was a country."
     He set sail from Boston in August, 1990, and returned in June, 1992. The videotape of his adventure, which originated as a Peabody Award-winning special for the Discovery Channel, consists mostly of videos Pinkney shot himself, sometimes happy and invigorated, admiring fantastic sunsets, other times wet, sick and miserable, battened down below decks and outlining dire conditions while his sailing gear rocks back and forth in the huge swells.
     Included are scenes of eager classrooms tracking Pinkney on maps, talking to him through the roar of satellite static, or watching his "video postcards." (Pinkney, though cut off from all direct human contact for months at a time, manages pearls such as praise for the "wonderful sovereignty of being alone.")
     Still, the connection with schools was not a complete success, particularly in Chicago.
     "It didn't work out as well in Chicago as I would have liked it," says Pinkney. He says going through the Board of Education led to the mishandling of the Chicago end of his voyage, particularly when he got back.
     "I would do three schools a day," he says. "I'd get to the school and they didn't know who I was or why I was there. It was crazy."
     All that is going to be fixed in his next project — a journey, with crew this time, retracing the triangular slave route between Brazil, the Caribbean and West Africa. This time he hopes to involve a half-million students.
     This will take money, and Pinkney has already started the distasteful process. His first dollar was easy — ponied up by a Charleston chief quartermaster named Manning Harvey. Pinkney has the dollar pinned to the wall.
     "I'm well on my way," Pinkney laughs. "I only have 849,999 to go."
     So what does a man learn, alone in a boat, facing the boundless ocean, for the better part of two years?
     "The simple truths of life," he says. "When I was out there, there were no days of the week. Because I was alone, because my life functions around what I have to do to maintain it, the only place in the world that exists is right there. The old saying, `There is no tomorrow'? There is no five minutes from now. There's only now, and that's the thing, to take action.
     "This was a dream; this was not the dream," he says. "I wanted to leave a benchmark of achievement for my grandchildren. (Pinkney's only child, Angela Walton, 35, a daughter from his first marriage, lives in Florida with her husband and two children.) This showed me that you can make dreams come true. But I should be able to accomplish more. I've got a list I can't even get halfway through in my lifetime. I'm writing my book — an adult book, not about sailing, but what about my life made this happen. I've got a film I want to do about this. And I want to go out and sail some more."
     Jake Fisher, a Chicago entrepreneur, considers Pinkney one of his heroes, but says that Pinkney only considers himself heroic for one thing.
     "He said, `There was just one day in my life when I was hero. That was the day that the boat left Boston. It was a beautiful day, with people all over the place, wishing me well. When I reached over and took the anchor out of the water, that was the moment."
     Fisher asked him why that moment was heroic.
     "Because most people go through life with their boat tied up next to the pier," Pinkney told him. "What made me a hero was that I weighed anchor."

               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 30, 1994

     I caught up with Bill Pinkney by phone Sunday night at his home in Puerto Rico.
     "I feel great for a man of my age, great for a man of any age. We've been here, this is our 13th year," he said, referring to his wife of nearly 20 years, Migdalia.
     He first retired in 2003, then came back in 2007 and sailed the tour of the Amistad, a reproduction of the Spanish slave schooner whose 1839 uprising became an abolitionist cause and a widely-followed legal case (and, eventually, a Steven Spielberg movie). 

     "Nova Scotia, England, Portugal, Senegal, Sierra Leone, then I retired again, then I came back again, took the Amistad to Havana Cuba." Pinkney said. "Then I retired again for the last time and moved to Fajardo, on the east coast of Puerto Rico.
     Not everything has been gravy — his catamaran charter business, running passengers to the British Virgin Islands, was a victim of COVID, when American tourism to the island almost completely dried up.
    But generally life is good for Capt. Pinkney. He was presented with the Mystic Seaport Museum's "America and the Sea Award" in 2022. And he just released, "Sailing Commitment Around the World with Captain Bill Pinkney," illustrated by Pamela C. Rice, a very handsome children's book.   
    "I'm close to the ocean," said Pinkney, who doesn't own a boat but — even better — has a friend who owns a boat, and still gets out on the water from time to time.

Don’t divert public money to private use

     Chicago is the only major American city with an elevated train ringing its downtown — OK, one of two, if you consider Miami to be a major city and its free little Metromover a real elevated train.
     So Chicagoans (and any stray Miamians finding themselves here) might have an easier time participating in a thought experiment I’d like to try today. Imagine if, along with an elevated train, we had an elevated sidewalk downtown. A private, members-only sidewalk, raised 20 feet in the air, with access granted to Chicagoans who pay a fee — say, $200 a week — to pass through the turnstiles, step into well-maintained elevators, or climb pristine stairways.
     Let’s call it the Sky Sidewalk, an overhead array of curving pathways — glassed in, air-conditioned in summer, heated in winter — where the choice few could avoid the cracked, dirty, windswept, crowded Chicago sidewalks (OK, not so crowded lately; work with me here). Certainly cracked and blustery, sometimes crime-ridden.
     Problems for the masses below to cope with best we can, stepping over potholes, hurrying past panhandlers. Frequently finding ourselves at street corners, shivering in the February cold, waiting for the light to change, trying not to cast an envious glance at the anointed above on the Sky Sidewalk, strolling easily across the street — no waiting on traffic for them.
     Now imagine there’s an election — actually you don’t have to imagine; there’s one for mayor in a couple of weeks. Some candidates mention a plan to address perennial pedestrian concerns: the cracks, the crime, the cars turning right whether you are trying to cross or not. You’re all ears. What is this plan?
     “So this is what we’re going to do,” says a candidate. “We’re going to take your tax dollars, and use them to buff the Sky Sidewalk. Maybe carpet part of it. Or put planters of fresh flowers. Some wind chimes perhaps. Because nice as it is, it could be even nicer. Where will the money come from? Tax dollars. Let’s give a break for people on the Sky Sidewalk. Really, why should those who don’t use the city sidewalks pay for their upkeep? They’re already paying $200 a week. Let’s give them a hand.”
     How would that fly with you?

To continue reading, click here.

Paul Vallas, man of mystery

     Almost 30 years ago I wrote a profile on Bill Pinkney, the first Black sailor to circumnavigate the globe alone — I think I'll repost that later this week. In interviewing his wife Ina, the restaurateur, it came out that while married, they lived in separate homes. In my mid-30s but naive as a lamb, I remember looking up and thinking, "Golly, what's that about?"
     Cohabitation is the predominant condition of marriage — I initially wrote "natural" but that is a fraught term nowadays, when even the concept of "normality" can be seen as a weapon in the supremacist's arsenal. Whatever you call it, 97 percent of married couples manage to live under the same roof.
     In Fran Spielman's excellent interview with Paul Vallas in the Sun-Times Saturday, the former Chicago Public Schools head tries to tap dance past by various controversies that have wrapped their arms around his knees. He explains only being registered to vote in Bridgeport for only the past year this way:
     “When I left Philadelphia to go to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, my wife did not want to go with me. She wanted to move back to where she was most comfortable. She bought a home right next to her aged parents in the same house where she grew up. … My kids were still relatively young, and she thought that’s where she could be most easily supported.
     Were I to respond to that by asking, "If your own wife didn't want to go with you, then why should the city of Chicago?" But that could be seen as mean, and personal. Besides, I am not a hard-charging A-list crisis administrator like Paul Vallas, who I suppose must go wherever someone is willing to hire him. The separation can be spun as consideration, I suppose, that his wife is encouraged to live where she is happiest, even if that is in a different part of the country from her husband. That's how the jetset fly. Cohabitation is for the earthbound ordinary.
     “Sometimes, people stay married because they make certain arrangements," Vallas continued, sounding like a character in a Barbara Cartland novel. "I’ve always lived where I’ve worked. This has been our understanding. I wanted my wife to be in her most comfortable setting with her friends and family ... while she allowed me to do what I do: rescues, turnaround projects, crisis management.”
     We are certainly a city in crisis. And sometimes an outsider brings the rigor needed (such as O. W. Wilson coming in to reform the Chicago Police Department in the early 1960s). But when it comes to Chicago, Paul Vallas is not an outsider. From city budget director to CEO of the Chicago Public Schools to consultant for the Fraternal Order of Police, he has had his chance ... whoops, has had a wealth of valuable experience he could bring to the fifth floor of City Hall.
     "Understanding." "Arrangement." These are freighted words. And having endured the tight-lipped mystery wrapped in a cipher befogged by enigma that is Lori Lightfoot, I suppose anyone is an improvement. But notice how he shifted the discussion — if his residence wasn't Palos Heights, where was it? The apartment in Bridgeport he got a year ago? Louisiana? Connecticut? At least Rahm was elected to Congress, and had a semi-legitimate reason not to live here. Vallas is just a hired gun who sees a potential opportunity for a fresh gig back in his hometown and is hurrying back, pretending he never left. If he thought he could be elected mayor of Phoenix, he'd have been living in Phoenix for the past year. Or claim to.