Author: Dan Brekke

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Your Illinois Governors: Felony Update (2011)

Update 12/7/2011: The judge has spoken: Blagojevich gets 14 years n prison.

With the news that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has been convicted on 17 of 20 counts of corruption, it's time to freshen my list of recent Illinois governors whose legal trouble reached felony level. As I said back in 2003, when George Ryan, Blagojevich's predecessor, was indicted on federal corrupion charges, Prairie State governors have racked up quite a record over the past half-century:

William G. Stratton (in office 1953-61): Indicted (1964) for income-tax evasion (acquitted).
Otto Kerner (1961-68): Indicted (1971) and convicted (bribery and other charges).
Sam Shapiro (1968-69): Never charged with anything, but then he only had eight months in office.
Richard Ogilvie (1969-73): Clean, so far as we know. Probably why he only served one term.
Dan Walker (1973-77): Indicted (1987) in his post-politics career as an S&L thief. Pled guilty.
Jim Thompson (1977-91): His career was about indicting other people, for a change.
Jim Edgar (1991-99): No dirt so far.
George Ryan (1999-2003): Indicted (2003) and convicted on federal corruption charges.
Rod Blagojevich (2003-2009): Convicted for influence peddling, including an alleged conspiracy to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat. (For a glimpse at government at its very best, it's worth reading the press release from the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. It's a 12-page PDF. Among the highlights: "In a conversation … on November 11, the charges state, Blagojevich said he knew that the President-elect wanted Senate Candidate 1 for the open seat but "they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. [Expletive] them." The full 78-page complaint, in PDF form, is available here: United States of America v. Rod R. Blagojevich and John Harris.)

Score:
Nine governors. Five indicted. Four convicted. One acquitted.

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Give Me That Old Time Vituperation

We often hear that we live in an era of remarkably blunt, if not downright ugly, political rhetoric. To me, the “rhetoric” seems to consists of patently loony claims–that the president was born in Mecca, brandishing an AK-47 among a family of bloodthirsty jihadis, for instance–that gain currency through relentless repetition.

Anyway, I happened across this the other night. It’s an account in the late Marc Reisner’s “Cadillac Desert” featuring Hiram Johnson, a Progressive Era politician who, among other things, championed the state’s now-jaded ballot initiative system. Here’s Johnson, talking about “General” Harrison Gray Otis, a figure he apparently did not think much of:

“Hiram Johnson was addressing a crowd in a Los Angeles auditorium when someone in the audience, who knew that Johnson’s talent for invective surpassed even the General’s, yelled out, ‘What about Otis?’ Johnson, all prognathous scowl and murderous intent, took two steps forward and began extemporaneously. ‘In the city of San Francisco we have drunk to the very dregs of infamy,’ he said in a low rumble. ‘We have had vile officials, we have had rotten newspapers. But we have had nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in his senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all the things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy. This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of southern California; he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon. My friends, he is the one thing that all Californians look at when, in looking at southern California, they see anything that its disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent–that,’ Johnson concluded in a majestic bawl, ‘that is Harrison Gray Otis!’ “

(As my friend Steve notes elsewhere: “Imagine anyone these days using a phrase like “he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon.” A way to call a person a bastard.” And indeed, I had meant to look that term up. Here’s what the OED has to say about it (under “bar”):

6. Heraldry. An honourable ordinary, formed (like the fess) by two parallel lines drawn horizontally across the shield, and including not more than its fifth part. bar sinister: in popular, but erroneous phrase, the heraldic sign of illegitimacy….

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Give Me That Old Time Vituperation

We often hear that we live in an era of remarkably blunt, if not downright ugly, political rhetoric. To me, the “rhetoric” seems to consists of patently loony claims–that the president was born in Mecca, brandishing an AK-47 among a family of bloodthirsty jihadis, for instance–that gain currency through relentless repetition.

Anyway, I happened across this the other night. It’s an account in the late Marc Reisner’s “Cadillac Desert” featuring Hiram Johnson, a Progressive Era politician who, among other things, championed the state’s now-jaded ballot initiative system. Here’s Johnson, talking about “General” Harrison Gray Otis, a figure he apparently did not think much of:

“Hiram Johnson was addressing a crowd in a Los Angeles auditorium when someone in the audience, who knew that Johnson’s talent for invective surpassed even the General’s, yelled out, ‘What about Otis?’ Johnson, all prognathous scowl and murderous intent, took two steps forward and began extemporaneously. ‘In the city of San Francisco we have drunk to the very dregs of infamy,’ he said in a low rumble. ‘We have had vile officials, we have had rotten newspapers. But we have had nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in his senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all the things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy. This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of southern California; he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon. My friends, he is the one thing that all Californians look at when, in looking at southern California, they see anything that its disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent–that,’ Johnson concluded in a majestic bawl, ‘that is Harrison Gray Otis!’ “

(As my friend Steve notes elsewhere: “Imagine anyone these days using a phrase like “he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon.” A way to call a person a bastard.” And indeed, I had meant to look that term up. Here’s what the OED has to say about it (under “bar”):

6. Heraldry. An honourable ordinary, formed (like the fess) by two parallel lines drawn horizontally across the shield, and including not more than its fifth part. bar sinister: in popular, but erroneous phrase, the heraldic sign of illegitimacy….

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Custer Day

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“Last Stand Hill” at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, near Crow Agency, Montana. Today’s the 135th anniversary of the battle. The stones are said to mark the spots where individual U.S. soldiers were found after the battle; the locations were marked first with stakes as burial details hurriedly covered the bodies, then with more permanent wooden markers. Later, most of the remains were moved to a common grave marked by the monument beyond the fence in the left distance (the remains of most officers, including Custer, were transported back East for burial; Custer was interred at West Point). In 1890, 14 years after the battle, the temporary markers were replaced with the white marble stones seen here. The strongest impression I had of the site when I first visited in 1988 was the sparse scattering of white markers stretching across several miles of rolling terrain. You can easily imagine the story the stones tell: a rapidly moving, chaotic fight in which many soldiers fell alone, in pairs, in groups of three or four. This group, which included Custer and his brother, is by far the largest on the battlefield.

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Coast Solstice

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I spent the day out reporting in Sonoma County–salmon stuff, which I’ll write more about tomorrow. The drive back down the freeway, U.S. 101, was brutal, so I took a detour out to the coast and stopped at Goat Rock, just south of where the Russian River empties into the Pacific. The last time I stopped there was 1985, though I’ve passed it many times since. I parked, walked around the beach recording sound. Then on the drive back to Highway 1 pulled over and hiked up a trail to a summit overlooking the coast (the name, it turns out, is Peaked Hill; height given variously at 367 or 377 feet above sea level). Above (looking south, toward Bodega Bay) and below (looking northwest across Arched Rock, left, and Goat Rock) are the views from the top. It was very warm inland today and absolutely perfect on the coast. By the time I was back in the Berkeley, just before 9 o’clock, the sun had just set and a seabreeze was breaking our hot spell.

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Family History

I think it’s pretty common among families to think and talk about the unseen influences on our lives. I”m talking about the little shreds of detail, or sometimes rich, complex stories, about our parents and maybe their parents that we think might explain something about them and about us.

Concrete example: Growing up, I was very aware that both my parents lost their fathers at an early age. My dad’s father died when he was 10; my mom’s dad died when she was 11. I came to assume, through small details I picked up over the years, that these events were traumatic if not shattering events in their families’ lives and that in one way or other they shaped my life and the lives of my siblings and maybe even the lives of our kids.

I was thinking about the biggest incident we heard about growing up, one that I think I heard my mom refer to simply as “the dunes.”

In August 1939, my mom, at age 9, was the lone survivor of a five-member family group swept into Lake Michigan at Miller Beach, in the Indiana dunes. I wrote a little bit about that a few years ago. Her account of what happened was pretty graphic–especially regarding her memories of trying to save a brother who was within arm’s reach and what it was like to have almost drowned (she said that by the time she was rescued she had stopped struggling; she was revived on the beach).

Mom suffered from depression for most of her life. It’s reasonable to think that one of the triggers was this terrible incident in the dunes. But she suffered a couple other major tragedies, too. The early death of her father, as I’ve mentioned, and the loss of a child–a brother of mine, the youngest of the four of us who arrived roughly annually in the mid-1950s, who died just before his second birthday. I saw some of the effects of that last tragedy. I remember that eventually my mom started seeing a psychiatrist–a move that may have saved her life and in some measure changed my life, too.

Something that was tucked away in the back of my head about the psychiatrist: Some years after my mom began seeing him, he suffered his own tragedy in the lake. He was out on his boat with his wife one August evening when a storm came up. The boat capsized, and the doctor and his wife were thrown overboard and separated. He was rescued after seven or eight hours in the water. She drowned. I recall my mom talking about this and overheard her saying that he told her that he simply didn’t want to get out of the lake when he was found.

Thinking about all this just now, I went looking for signs of the doctor online. He’d be in his 80s now, or even older. I checked news archives, and the lake incident came up as the only hit for his name in the Chicago area. And here’s what prompted this post: The date of his accident? It was the anniversary of the 1939 dunes drowning. I wonder if my mom and the doctor ever talked about that coincidence.

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Restrooms & Cemeteries

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First morning of our recent road trip: We stopped in Roslyn, Washington, on the east side of Snoqualmie Pass and a few miles off Interstate 90. Reason: The town was re-created as “Cicely, Alaska” for the series “Northern Exposure” back in the early and mid-’90s. The main street in town, Pennsylvania Avenue, is much the same as it’s depicted on the show. Just in back of me when I shot this was The Brick, the tavern/restaurant featured on the show. The building across the way–the exposure here hides the details–was the location of the radio station on which the character Chris held forth. The sign pictured here? Never saw it in the show, and I can’t account for the pairing of restrooms and cemeteries.

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From the Road: More Undead History

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A few more pictures from the hundreds I almost compulsively shot over the past week. After I go back to work this afternoon, the pictures will turn into a long-term photo editing project that I'll never quite get to. The shot above is from the Haymarket martyrs' memorial in Forest Home Cemetery (originally Waldheim, and when you see all the Germans buried there, you know why) in Forest Park, on Chicago's western boundary.

If you grow up around Chicago, at some point you encounter Haymarket in a history lesson. It seems long ago and far away, and of course in one sense it is: The events surrounding Haymarket began unfolding in 1886. But as I observed last week at the Little Bighorn battlefield, our history is too new to be settled, or at least much of it is, and forces are still contending to define or even own some chapters. Haymarket is one of those episodes that's still the object of curiosity for many and for a few at least a living symbol of the struggle for workers' rights.

We headed out there on an outing with my dad on Sunday. We had visited about four and a half years ago, and I still remembered how to get to the cemetery and find the memorial without asking. Our rounds went like this: first the Dairy Queen on Irving Park Road, near Central Avenue; then Mount Olive Cemetery, where my dad's parents and many other family members are buried; then the house my dad grew up in, on Nashville Avenue, and the neighborhood school he attended, Joseph Lovett Elementary. At that point, he said he wanted to go out to Harlem Avenue. OK — I could do that. With no destination in mind, I suggested stopping by Forest Home.

haymarket060511f.jpg I'm still surprised to find that the monument, and the nearby grave of Emma Goldman, still draw visitors who leave flowers and other tributes (I found the same at Mother Jones's grave in Mount Olive, Illinois; and just last week, when we visited the Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, I saw that folks are leaving flowers and other small remembrances for Wild Bill Hickok and Martha Jane Burke (Calamity Jane) and Seth Bullock–all notable characters on a recent HBO series. People do feel attached to these figures from the past–though for now it's best not to digress into the quality of the attachment).

Of course, not all the latter-day feeling that modern visitors develop for the Haymarket memorial is necessarily very smart. On the back of the memorial, some clever lads–why do I think the perpetrators were male?–have gone to work with markers of some kind and added the legends in the photo above ("We are the birds of the coming storm" is a quote from August Spies, an anarchist who was among those hanged after the 1886 Haymarket bombing).

Why the impulse to do something so lame? Of course, that's been the question ever since teen-agers started chiseling smart-ass hieroglyphics into Egyptian tombs way back in the day. I suppose you could make the argument that it's better to be actively engaged with the history the monument represents–you know, jumping in and joining in the dialectic–than treating the space as sacred, sterile, and dead. Had the guys with the markers showed up while I was there, I think we'd haveour own lively dialectical exploration. (Click images for larger versions.)

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Road Blog: Berkeley

And on the seventh day, I flew home from Chicago. I began and ended the journey at the North Berkeley BART station, and at the extreme ends of the train schedule (last Tuesday, I caught a 4:30 a.m. train to take an early shuttle to the Oakland airport; tonight I arrived back on the very last train of the night and got home about 1 a.m.). Here are some basics:

Tuesday, May 31: Flew from Oakland to Seattle-Tacoma airport; drove with Sakura and Eamon from the airport to Butte, Montana. (Notable stops: Roslyn, Washington; Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Superior, Montana).

Wednesday, June 1: Drove from Butte to Spearfish, South Dakota. (Notable stop: Little Bighorn Battlefield).

Thursday, June 2: Drove from Spearfish, South Dakota., to Council Bluffs, Iowa. (Notable stops: Deadwood’s Mount Moriah Cemetery, Crazy Horse monument, Mount Rushmore, Yankton, South Dakota (cool bridge there).

Friday, June 3: We split as previously planned. I flew to Chicago from Omaha. Eamon and Sakura drove to Independence, Missouri, by way of Lamoni, Iowa (and if you’re sharp you can tell me the connection between those two towns).

Saturday, June 4: I enjoyed my leisure in Chicago. Eamon and Sakura drove into town from Independence.

Sunday, June 5: Chicago for everyone.

Monday, June 6: Eamon and Sakura drove from Chicago to Youngstown, Ohio. They expect to be in New York today (Tuesday, the 7th). I flew from Chicago to San Francisco.

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Road Blog: Chicago

Today, the road trip included zero time on the road. My sister and I did walk a few blocks up the street and back, though. And Eamon and Sakura arrived after their detour from Council Bluffs to Lamoni, Iowa, and Independence, Missouri. Their drive today brought them from Independence, Harry S Truman's hometown, through 100-degree temperatures in Missouri and severe thunderstorms near Bloomington, Illinois–family home of Adlai Stevenson, who failed to succeed Truman.

Thunderstorms passed through the Chicago area, too. It's an unusual enough occurrence for me, living in the mostly thunder-free Bay Area, that I went out into Ann and Dan's backyard and recorded some of the storm as it passed. The storm and recording were less than Wagnerian in its dramatic dimension, but was plenty atmospheric. Here's an MP3 snippet:

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Back on the other end of this trip, the endless rainy season of 2010-11 continues in the Bay Area and Northern California. To define "endless rainy season," we refer to the National Weather Service record report from earlier today, which runs down a few locations that saw their rainiest June 4th ever. An earlier forecast discussion raised the possibility that some locations might exceed their monthly records for the entire month of June today (a surprising possibility, but not an amazing one: we don't get a lot of rain on average in June; the June record for San Francisco, recorded in 1884, is about two and a half inches. One earlier report ran down rainfall totals over the region through late Saturday morning. Noteworthy: the 2-inch-plus totals in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the 3-inch plus amounts in the Santa Lucia Range in Monterey County.

It's more than I want to get into in detail at this late hour, but: water. One impression driving across the northern Rockies and Plains is how wet and green everything looks (but no, we didn't see any honest-to-goodness flooding in Montana or South Dakota) In California, you think of water supply when you see all the rain (and in the mountains, snow) we've been getting as the wet season continues. The state's daily report on its largest reservoirs shows storage is more than 110 percent of average for this date and the biggest lakes are close to capacity. In the mountains, the snowpack is still at 97 percent of its April 1 average–April 1 being the date when the snowpack is at its maximum. We're two months past that now, and the snowpack is at 343 percent of normal for the beginning of June (in a regional breakdown, the snowpack for the Northern Sierra and far northern mountains is at 559 percent of normal for this date (see California Department of Water Resources/California Data Exchange Center: Snow Water Equivalents).