'Messy, imperfect, awkward, beautiful, these people'

"Marsha," 2023, watercolor and charcoal on paper, 45x36, by Lisa Edelstein.

   
     My parents are on the move again. After two years at an assisted living facility in Buffalo Grove, it's down to Addison to a smaller place that better suits their needs. Moving means packing, and once more my wife and I boxed up their dwindling possessions — far fewer than when they left Boulder in 2022 — weeding out what can't make the transition from three rooms to one.
     "How about this?" my wife said, holding up a round metal 1950s cookie tin. "Photos."
     "Throw it away," replied my mother. She never even looked inside.
     The past burdens and buoys us, holding us back and driving us forward, like stunned survivors wandering across a minefield. The moment I clapped eyes on Lisa Edelstein's paintings, my first thought was "Jewish unease." The awkwardness of one's own relatives, frozen in the garish 1970s. The lucky few who somehow made it from Lodz to Levittown. They call to us, in their thin, wavering voices, from beyond the grave, or its lip. A hard tin to throw away, and Edelstein has taken her family Kodachromes and transformed them into evocative paintings.
     "I love finding the in-between shots, the poorly posed, the awkward, the strange angles, even damaged photos or film stills," said Edelstein, an actor you might know as Dr. Cuddy in "House." "Taking these unvalued shots and blowing the images up into carefully rendered paintings, celebrating them that way — there’s so much life and story and discomfort that gets exposed."
     Edelstein's work has to be viewed through the fog of anti-Semitism, always a haze in society but billowing up even more after six months of the war in Gaza. Not the easiest moment to be Jewish, never mind examine the out-of-placeness of our tribe.
     "Yes, this is a wildly fraught time to be Jewish, which is absolutely part of why I am making these paintings," said Edelstein, whose husband, Robert Russell, is also an artist. "Robert and I have gone to countless art shows over the 14 years we’ve been together, and we’ve seen a lot of identity-based work. All of the various identities were demanding representation within the larger human story. And not just representation — celebration. But not Jews. Where are the Jews?"

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Gail Wise bought the first Ford Mustang sold in the United States; 60 years later, she still owns it

 

     In the spring of 1964, Gail Wise taught third grade at Sunnyside Elementary School in Berkeley, Illinois, a small suburb just east of Elmhurst. She was still Gail Brown then, loved her job, but it was a dozen miles south from where she lived with her parents in Park Ridge.
     "Back then you lived at home until you got married," she remembered. 

     At 22 years old, she couldn't expect to drive her parents' car forever. She needed her own.
     So on Wednesday, April 15, 1964, she and her father went to Johnson Ford on Cicero Avenue in Chicago — her family always drove Fords. Her father had driven a '57 Fairlane 500, then a '63 Thunderbird.
     "My parents always drove a convertible," she said. "I just knew I wanted a convertible."
     But there were no convertibles on the showroom floor. When the salesman saw Brown's disappointment, he took pity on her, and said they had something special in back. They weren't supposed to sell it yet, but she could take a look. He pulled a tarp off a Mustang convertible in "Skylight Blue." No Mustangs would officially go on sale for two days, until after it was unveiled at the New York World's Fair on April 17. If she wanted this one, she'd have to buy it without a test drive. She did want it. 

     "I just fell in love. It was sporty. It had the bucket seats, the transmission on the floor," she said. "He started it up. It went zoom zoom and made that nice, loud noise. I was just so excited to buy it. I was in heaven. I told the salesman it was for me."
     Some aspects of the car might surprise today — the Mustang had seat belts in the front seats but not the back. The passenger seat could not be adjusted. Back-up lights were optional.
     The price was $3,447.50. Her salary was $5,000 a year. Her father loaned her the money.
     Making Gail Wise the first person in the United States to buy a Ford Mustang — 60 years ago on Monday.
     "When I drove out of the showroom, nobody had seen this car yet," she recalled. "Everybody was waving at me, asking me to slow down, so they could see this car. I felt like a movie star. I was very happy. I drove it to school the next day. All those boys, the seventh and eighth graders, were hovering over it."
     She drove that Mustang for 15 years. She married Tom Wise, an electronics technician who worked on the guidance system on a nuclear submarine in the Navy, in 1966. The couple moved to Charleston, South Carolina. Their four kids arrived, and she gave up teaching.
     "When you were married, you started a family and stayed home with the children," she said.

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Flashback 1995: "Ito unlikely to leave, experts say."

A courtroom scene, by José Guadalupe Posada (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     O.J. Simpson's body had scarcely begun to singe in hell before readers wondered when I'd be weighing in on the subject. Never, I hope. I hated the case while it was going on, the omnipresence, the sensationalism. Plus I wasn't yet a columnist, so only wrote about it as an assignment, covering some local reaction to a trial development. I wouldn't share this except for Northwestern professor Dan Polsby's sharp closing quote, which is worthy of remembrance. Polsby left NU in 1999 and joined Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, retiring in 2020.

     Chicago legal experts regard the possibility of Judge Lance Ito stepping down from the O.J. Simpson trial as just the latest bit of empty theater in a trial that seems to grow stranger and stranger. Few think he will declare a mistrial.
     "Given the investment that everybody has in the trial, I seriously doubt he will" recuse himself, said Dan Polsby, a professor of law at Northwestern University Law School.
     Questions of a judge's possible conflict of interest are rare, and usually are settled without the judge stepping down. Ito did disqualify himself Tuesday from ruling on the tapes of Mark Fuhrman insulting Ito's wife.
     "Contrary to popular opinion, this is not the first trial in history," said Tom Scorza, a former assistant U.S. attorney. "Many times problems develop between a judge and a given witness, particularly a police witness."
     Typically, in matters of bias the judge is concerned with how an appeals court will view a situation, Scorza said. But a Simpson appeal based on bias is unlikely because the judge's possible bias is against a prosecution witness. If Simpson is found guilty, to argue the judge was biased against a witness whose testimony helped convict him doesn't make sense. And if he is found not guilty, there is no need to appeal.
     Area lawyers tend to be critical of Ito, who they say should never have let Fuhrman's racial beliefs become part of the trial.
     "Let's assume he is a racist: So what?" said Patricia Bobb, a trial lawyer and former prosecutor. "Does that establish the fact he planted evidence? The law of evidence is you can't impeach people on collateral matters. Ito is facing a problem he created."
     Bobb said perhaps having Ito step down might not be such a bad thing.
     Northwestern's Dan Polsby seems to agree.
     "This trial is a scale model of eternity," he said. "The O.J. Simpson case looks like it's going to go on until the heat death of the universe."

            —Originally published in the Sun-Times Aug. 16, 1995

Bumped to Sunday

DALL-E AI program

      No column in the paper today. I asked if the column could run a little long — okay, almost twice as long — in order to unspool a sweet story I thought needed  room to stretch its legs, and my editors bumped it to Sunday, where there's more real estate to fill. 
     A very 20th century, black-ink-on-dead trees concern. Although if I've learned anything in writing, it's that your hindrances are also benefits, and as vexing as it can be to cram your thoughts into a set space, doing so does encourage concision. I write my column in Blogger, which through some odd quirk has no word count function — maybe because online you have no limits. Online you can ramble on for as long as you like. Online, the idea that few are following you to the end because you're such a prolix bastard might never cross your mind.  Online, you can just say the same thing, over and over and...
     Sorry. Where was I? When I finish drafting my column in Blogger, and go to put it in BrightSpot, the latest platform the paper dredged up somewhere to compose our work upon, I'm always happy to see it's 850 or 900 or 1,000 words. That means I can then tighten the thing up to 750, 760 tops, the word count to park myself on page two. Without any loss whatsoever. Just the opposite: it's an improvement. Shorter is better. Back when I used to speak to students, I always told them, if they want to ace any assignment, just write it twice as long as the assigned length, then cut it in half. They reward me with boggled, yeah-that's-never-happening expressions.
    In honor of the above, I just cut out the next 10 lines of exposition. Trust me, you'll never miss it.
    When BrightSpot was rolled out, the biggest change was that I could no longer correct errors and simply post the new version. I had to find an editor to do it for me. Which was an earthquake, to me, because I'm always finding mistakes in past columns. I called the editor and begged her — truly beseeched, voice quavering — to let me post corrections. It was pathetic, and she said no. Basically, a control thing, and the kindergarten teacher view of staff — if we let Johnny do it, then we have to let everybody do it. Because we're all the same. When in fact, I always took the night shift employee's proprietary view of the place. At 1 a.m. the office is often empty, and you can go nap on the sofa in the editor-in-chief's office.
     For all its flaws, BrightSpot does work. Last week Facebook served up my Neenah foundry story from two years ago, and I reread it and noticed that I talk about "slats" in manhole covers when I meant "slits." Four times. Quite a lot really. The mistake flew past me, while carefully writing it, and all the editors carefully reading it, and every reader over the past two years — or none who wrote in pointing out the flub. So I created a new draft, replacing "slats" with "slits," called up a night editor and had him post it for me. Then checked to make sure it had actually happened, because with BrightSpot, you never know. Correcting errors that nobody else noticed in a story two years old. That's a good thing, I think. Unless it isn't. Anyway, fun column coming Sunday. 

Mailbag

    Assessing reality is my stock-in-trade. I can't afford to let illusions and ego guide me. Thus it's natural for me to acknowledge just what a small pile of pebbles I've managed to accumulate in my life. Humility comes easy; it's not only true, but useful. I'm proud that, in Friday's column about hot honey pizza, I could disgorge a paragraph like this one:

It's so obvious, now — you splash hot sauce on chicken; you pour honey. But it never occurred to me to combine the two. That's why some men run growing $40 million companies — Mike's Hot Honey is on the menu in 3,000 restaurants and sold in 30,000 retail establishments nationwide — and some are wage slaves jammed onto the No. 36 bus going up State Street, excited at the prospect of free pizza.

   If I asked you, what about that paragraph would prompt you to write in, aggrieved, I bet you would be hard-pressed to find the flaw to criticize. No so Chris S., who wrote:

Noticed in your writing you like to boast about yourself whether it’s how you used to get included at Gene & Georgetti’s political luncheon and now free pizza for this.

You should try some manual labor (ya know a real job where you actually produce something) and not just a bunch of hot air about a bunch of smorgasbord bullshit funded by a non for profit organization backed by JB Pritzker.

You’re one of the great hack writers of your era with little to no insight in Chicago newspapers. You’re legacy amounts to an article your colleagues will write that will be forgotten in tomorrows paper when the new headlines roll out.

    Usually I'd shrug that kind of thing off without reply. But I felt extra generous. He was obviously a reader — the Gene & Georgetti reference was from a column on Jay Doherty that ran three months ago. Plus he was criticizing me over something for which I am actually proud. It was so vituperative, plus grammatically spotty ("you're legacy," "tomorrows paper") that getting angry didn't seem an option — he was mad enough for the both of us. So I read his remarks again, thought carefully, and replied this way:

        Chris:

         No argument here. Thanks for writing.

         NS

     Most people are actually pretty nice. Even hateful trolls — that sounds odd, but I find that if you meet the nastiest remark with a dollop of kindness, the person in question dissolves in a puddle of gratitude. Hurt people hurt people, but they coo at a touch. I realized long ago that the psycho who writes me a dozen hateful emails a day also, in his topsy-turvy world, really likes me, and wants my attention, like a schoolboy pulling a girl's pigtails.

    He replied:

    lol no problem. I’m just jealous

    I did pause at the lol — "laughing out loud." Right wing haters are always laughing — trying to show their indifference and superiority, in a kind of "look at them Siegfrid, they're just ants" fashion. Anything that confuses them is deemed funny. It's a cover.  I could have left it there, but I was on a roll, and replied to his reply:

     No worries. I have a great life. A little jealousy is understandable.

     Not something I ever actually come out and say much. But true, nevertheless.

A thing happened at a place, maybe.

                        "Yet why not say what happened?"  
                                              — Robert Lowell
  
     The tiniest detail can reveal something bad. A strangely-shaped freckle . The crack in the foundation, spreading.
     A small story popped up at the end of last week and was forgotten. The Museum of Science and Industry abruptly closed last Wednesday afternoon, sending visitors home "as staff moves military artifacts from archival storage" to allow a bit of "unplanned maintenance."
     "Out of an abundance of caution, and to ensure proper and safe removal, we have specially trained military personnel as well as local officials on-site," the museum statement read.
     What does that mean? "Military artifacts?" They aren't talking about old uniforms and mess kits. That has to be ... what? Hand grenades? Unexploded shells? What else requires "specially trained military personnel" to handle? You don't bring in the Army to remove a canteen.
     I waited for updates. Nothing.
     Fine. I'm a reporter, I'll do it. I phoned and emailed Museum of Science and Industry spokesperson Kelsey Ryan.
     Hours passed. I called its current president, Chevy Humphrey. When she arrived in 2021, the newspaper sent me to greet her with the big hurrah-for-Dr.-Humphrey profile. She had no trouble talking, then, about the new “Marvel: Universe of Super-Heroes” exhibit. Surely she'd explain what happened now.
     "Chevy doesn't take phone calls" said the MSI receptionist. I waved the Sun-Times like a paper flag and she put me through to her voicemail. Nothing.
     Okay, work the other side of the story, the "special trained military personnel" and "local officials." Who could that be? I called with the U.S. Army. It wasn't them. I put in the ritual calls to the Chicago police and fire departments — crickets chirping in a field. I texted Alexi Giannoulias, the Illinois Secretary of State. His office has its own bomb squad.
     Giannoulias is old school, in that he still believes in an open democracy where information is freely shared. He got back immediately, reminding me that the world where we're heading — a world where major Chicago institutions abruptly eject visitors and shut their doors, calling in unspecified military units to cope with unnamed threats — is also a world where libraries that dare feature books about a penguin with two dads receive bomb threats. Twenty-two in Illinois last summer alone. He described HB 4567, passed out of house committee last Thursday, to better protect libraries against being silenced by people who, like the MSI, are allergic to the unfettered flow of information.
     “Our librarians and libraries have faced an onslaught of threats of violence and ideological intimidation for simply serving their communities,” said Giannoulias, who also serves as State Librarian. “We have seen an escalation of violence seeking to censor and restrict information."
     His office pointed me toward the U.S. Air Force Explosive Ordnance Group.

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"The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured"

     "Go to Target, get yourself a pair of glasses," ordered my wife, bustling in the kitchen Monday morning, getting ready to leave for work.
     "So you read my column ...?" I ventured.
     "No," she said. Maybe she heard me in the basement, clattering around. 

     "The next time there's an eclipse, we'll be dead," she explained. "Go to Target and get glasses."
     I don't recall her ever saying something like that, the "next time this happens we'll be dead" formation. I'm not sure I like it.
     Though it is true. The next eclipse in the Chicago area is Sept. 14, 2099. So yes, long dead and forgotten. You too.

I tucked away everything from the 2017
eclipse, including the Saluki-shaped fan.
Except the glasses; I'm not sure why.

     Even as I was writing "Skip the eclipse" column (and yes, I was proud of the little interior rhyme) I could feel my mood shifting. First because I could tell there was something unspoken underneath it. A buried Something Else. And I knew what. I file things, quite methodically, and assumed that I'd tucked the 2017 eclipse stuff away. But couldn't lay my hands on it just yet. I hated buying a new pair of glasses when I still had the old ones., somewhere. Frugal to a fault.  I searched drawers, files.

     Screw it. My wife's instructions gave a bit of steel in my spine. I'm good at following directions. Just past 8 a.m. I strolled over to Ace Hardware. No eclipse glasses. So I drove over to Target. No glasses. 
     I was just about resigned to construct some crude viewing device out of a cereal box, when a thought bubbled up that should have occurred to me at the start. I might be solitary, but I am not in fact alone. I emailed three neighbors. Surely they were on top of this who eclipse situation. No response. I headed over the Y to work out before lunch, and driving back down our block, found a knot of neighbors standing in a driveway across the street. I lowered a window. They'd texted me back, and had already gathered three special eclipse glasses and two types of cookies, and their own homemade viewing device, which didn't really work, plus a dog, adding energy. They'd organized the whole thing down to the minute: come back at 1:35 p.m. I told them I would return in ten minutes.
     We tramped over to the public library — in my backyard —  where more Northbrookites had assembled, to view the wonder en masse. We set ourselves up across the field — soccer in summer, ice hockey in winter — because we were going to be joined by one of my neighbor's daughters, a high school senior, and her boyfriend. Maybe we all shared my unspoken tendency to want to be near others but not necessarily in the main scrum. Music was produced — Bonnie Tyler, "Total Eclipse of the Heart," natch, and "You're So Vain" ("You flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia, to see the total eclipse of the sun...") Conversation ensued, though I did not mention Shakespeare's Sonnet 107, which begins, "Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul/Of the wide world dreaming on things to come," and includes a line that almost projects my initial discomfiture onto one of the heavenly bodies involved, "The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured/And the sad augurs mock their own presage."

    That last line means that grim worries are ridiculed by their very direness when "Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd." 

     In other words: don't get stressed. Stuff works out. I saw the eclipse — in a better situation than I could have imagined, at first, with friends, eating homemade macrons. I didn't go blind. "And peace proclaims olives of endless age." Not sure what that means, but it sounds nice.

     As much as I tried to fix in mind the moments I observed the bright orange crescent sun gobbled up by the pitch black moon — this would never happen again, not to me anyway — that wasn't really the memorable part. The eclipse had been so fussed over, culturally, but really didn't seem all that significant, not compared to the pleasant company of my neighbors. There's no marvel in the sky like others showing up, earthbound though we be, the happiness of someone having your back when you think that you're on your own.