Category: Chicago

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Behold a Pale Hose

Even though I’ve been away from Chicago more than half my life — and when you get down to it, I grew up in the suburbs, not in the city — most of my family is still in and around the city and I follow what goes on there with more than passing interest. With the sports teams, too. And even though my brothers and I grew up with a Cubs allegiance I blame on my father, the Sox getting into the World Series is news.

Dad’s pulling for them, I think mostly because Mom and her brothers were all big Sox fans and, yeah, they’d love to see it happen. They’d love it especially because this kind of thing happens so seldom in Chicago. The Sox were the most recent visitors to the Series, having last played there (and lost) in 1959. The Cubs last trip was summarized by the late Steve Goodman:

“You know the law of averages says:

Anything will happen that can.

That’s what it says.

But the last time the Cubs won a National League pennant

Was the year we dropped the bomb on Japan.”

So talking to Dad just now, he said: “It would be great to see them go all the way” — win the World Series. No debate there, though I’ll confess I’ve never had much love for the Sox under their current ownership and have never set foot inside the sadly misconceived stadium they built to replace Comiskey Park, the ballpark in which the Sox had played since 1910. The old place was decrepit by the exacting, fussy standards of our age; but it had history on its side and a certain trashed elegance that might have been revived.

But that’s a detour. Let’s turn back to my dad. Yes, it would be great to see a World Series winner in Chicago. In fact, it would be the first in his 84 years (he was born too late for the Golden Age of Chicago baseball, which seems to have coincided with the Roosevelt (Teddy, not FDR), Taft, and Wilson administrations.

OK — I’m on board. Go Sox.

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In Memoriam

By way of Lydell, who heard this on Air America this morning:

Theodore Roosevelt Heller

Theodore Roosevelt Heller, 88, loving father of Charles (Joann) Heller; dear brother of the late Sonya (the late Jack) Steinberg. Ted was discharged from the U.S. Army during WWII due to service related injuries, and then forced his way back into the Illinois National Guard insisting no one tells him when to serve his country. Graveside services Tuesday 11 a.m. at Waldheim Jewish Cemetery (Ziditshover section), 1700 S. Harlem Ave., Chicago. In lieu of flowers, please send acerbic letters to Republicans. [Emphasis added.] Arrangements by Chicago Jewish Funerals, Douglas MacIsaac, funeral director 847-229-8822, www.cjfinfo.com. Published in the Chicago Tribune on 10/10/2005.

(Historical note: The place Mr. Heller is being interred in a couple of hours is close to but not the same as the Waldheim (Forest Home) Cemetery where the Haymarket martyrs are buried.)

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September 3, 1921

In 1921, September 3 fell on a Saturday. On that day:

A son, Stephen Daniel, is born to the Rev. Sjur and Otilia (Sieverson) Brekke in Warren, Minnesota, the seat of Marshall County. I’d love to know what the Rev. Brekke’s sermon was the next day to his congregation at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Alvarado, 11 miles west of Warren.

Elsewhere:

Henry Bellmon, future governor and U.S. senator from Oklahoma, is born near Tonkawa, Oklahoma.

St. Johnsville, New York, police officer David Bennett Hill is struck by a hit-and-run driver and killed.

Photographer Ruth Orkin born in Boston.

The Cincinnati Reds beat the visiting Chicago Cubs, 4-0, at Crosley Field (so what’s new?). The White Sox fall to the St. Louis Browns, 5-0, at Comiskey Park. The game marks the final appearance of Browns pitcher Joe DeBerry, 24, just a year after making his big-league debut.

Florence M. Foos, 19, marries Fred D. Erni in Bison, Kansas. They had been married nearly 65 years when she died on April 3, 1986.

The population of the world: Roughly 1.86 billion (today: 6.46 billion). Of the United States: 105 million (today: 297 million). Of Marshall County, Minnesota: 19,443 (2000 census: 10,155).

Film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle drives from Los Angeles to San Francisco to party with friends. By the end of the Labor Day weekend, he’d be a suspect in a murder case — a scandal that all but ended his career.

The September 3 Saturday Evening Post features an article called “The Uses of Calamity” by journalist and early press critic Will Irwin (I haven’t found the text).

In Binghamton, New York, Erma Mae Bryan, 24, marries Herman Otto Wunderlich, 42, who had refused to wed until his mother had passed away.

In the September 3 issue of the British medical journal, The Lancet, Dr. R.W. Burkitt notes that powdered rhubarb has proven effective in treating acute dysentery.

Robert Staughton Lynd marries Helen Merrill. Their son, Staughton Lynd, becomes a noted conscientious objector.

In the 16th Davis Cup tennis tournament, the United States defeats Japan, 5-0.

Ernest Hemingway married Hadley Richardson (it didn’t last).

The Arkansas City (Kansas) Daily Traveler reports: “John Peters, for fifteen years a resident of the little town of Ashton, in Sumner county, west of here, has located in Arkansas City and will in the future make his home in the best city in Kansas. … He has purchased the grocery store of A. L. Bendure, located at 426 North A Street, and he will take charge of the business there next Monday morning.”

Lightning strikes the Lower Coverdale, New Brunswick, Methodist Church.

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Flying Home

Heading back, watching the night unfold, watching the towns approach, slide past,

right-angle layouts, the bright stitching of main streets against invisible landscape.

I can guess the names of the bigger towns: Rockford. DeKalb. Galesburg. Iowa City. Cedar Rapids. All maybes. Nothing big enough to suggest Des Moines or Omaha. Then the smaller towns. Some I’ve passed through, others are just names I’ve picked up along the way. Dyersville. Grinnell. Ottumwa. Story City. Stanhope. Storm Lake. Then across the invisible Missouri: Grand Island. McCook. Hastings. Ogallala.

But most without any names that I know, though I’d love to learn them. All down there somewhere in that thinning web of settlements as we move west, each town throwing its main-drag strands of light into the dark. Island universes in uncounted numbers.

[Translation: United Flight 385, Chicago to Oakland. Took off 8:45 p.m. CDT, landed 10:45 p.m. PDT.]

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A Day in Greater Chicagoland

Towpath

We drove from Dad’s place on the far North Side out toward Joliet, southwest of the city, to find the spot where the Des Plaines and Kankakee rivers come together to form the Illinois.

The first 99 percent of the route is straightforward: If you like, you can drive to within a few miles of the spot on Interstate highways. But we got off the expressway and took side roads to follow the dual channels of the Des Plaines and the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The side roads weren’t pastoral lanes; we drove past one tank farm and refinery and generating plant after another. Eventually we turned away from the Des Plaines and drove west and south through brand new subdivisions — some half built, some just surveyors’ markers outlining streets and lots for homes that will go up next year; one neighborhood with a long curving boulevard of fresh asphalt and a giant new playground and not a single home even under construction yet. We eventually passed through a place called Minooka, which must have been a quiet little crossroads once. We crossed a highway at a strip mall called Mallard Point and drove south about a mile to a T intersection where we met my brother John, his wife, Dawn, and their two kids (Sean and Leah) who had driven over to meet us from my other brother’s place).

After wandering around on a couple of country roads, we finally figured out that the road to the confluence depicted on one of our maps was actually the towpath to the old Illinois and Michigan Canal — the link that in the mid-19th century connected Chicago and Lake Michigan and all points east to the Mississippi River and the interior of much of the United States. We hiked down the path for maybe three quarters of a mile, to where the conjoined rivers go through a lock and dam. A little short of the confluence, but close enough for today. Everyone was still smiling on our way back to the cars.

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Random Reading

A product of random reading:

On September 4, 1886, the Chicago Tribune critiqued a pamphlet on a now-forgotten political scandal by a now-forgotten writer: ""The pamphlet on the Paine Bribery Case and the United States Senate, by Albert H. Walker, is plainly the effusion of a crank."

Mr. Walker was an attorney, author of a textbook on patents, who apparently took himself very seriously. The Tribune’s choice of words prompted him to sue for libel. Walker filed a declaration in federal court in Chicago that said the Tribune had published the remark "to cause it to be suspected and believed that plaintiff was a man of crude, ill digested, ill considered, and wild ideas and aims, and to be supposed to be without skill, tact, adequate information, or common sense." Furthermore:

"… to publicly characterize the plaintiff as a "crank," and thus to publicly impute to him sundry qualities, aims, and methods highly inconsistent with usefulness and success as a lawyer and author, … plaintiff has been greatly prejudiced in his credit and reputation, and caused to be considered an unreliable and injudicious person, and destitute of those qualities on which the earnings of a lawyer or a serious author depend; and has been greatly vexed and mortified, and has been deprived of divers great earnings which would otherwise have accrued to him in his professional duties, and divers great royalties which otherwise would have been paid to him on sales of his books."

Walker also noted that since President James Garfield’s assassination in 1881 at the hands of Charles J. Guiteau — widely described as a crank — "the word … has obtained a definite meaning in this country, and is understood to mean a crack-brained and murderously inclined person, and is so used by the public press."

The court wasn’t moved by Walker’s entreaty to help him recover his reputation. It granted the Trib’s motion to dismiss Walker’s claims, resorting to Ogilvie’s Imperial Dictionary to support its finding that "the word would seem to have no necessarily defamatory sense." In fact, the court’s opinion (Walker v. Tribune, 1887) suggested Walker get a thicker skin: " It is no libel upon a man who has entered the field of authorship to underrate his talents."

Despite the trauma of being called a crank by no less an august organ than the Trib, Walker managed to make a living afterward. His patent textbook went through at least four editions. He lectured on patents at Cornell. And he wrote one of the first books on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, still circulating today.

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GoogleCrime

Another incarnation of Google Maps: IncidentLog.com. The site takes preliminary police reports from several dozen participating jurisdictions and maps their locations and details. Here’s the report for Berkeley (Google defeats my feeble efforts to make a screenshot of one of their maps — hey, sounds like a weekend project). Anyway, it’s a useful display if your thinking about what the ne’er-do-wells are doing in your town (we recently had a couple of daylight stickups within a block of our place). The limitation right now is that so few localities are listed, maybe because relatively few offer readily usable data.

OK, so poking around, I see a reference to ChicagoCrime.org, which does essentially the same thing as the IncidentLog does elsewhere. ChicagoCrime has a new Google Maps gadget that essentially combines the routemaking feature on Gmaps Pedometer and the site’s crime database. The resulting tool lets you plot a route anywhere in the city, set the parameters for time and type of crime, then get a Google map showing all the bad stuff that happens along the path of your evening constitutional. When you reach a danger spot, you can break into a run, resulting in fitness and personal safety benefits, or at least a good sweat.

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‘This Old Cub’

Kate made an odd find at the neighborhood video store while returning a couple of my late DVDs. “This Old Cub,” a documentary on Ron Santo, the great third baseman, by his son Jeff. The movie’s got an amateurish feel to it, and at the end it comes off as a plea for Santo to be elected to the Hall of Fame. In fact, the movie builds up to the moment when Santo believes he’s about to be elected by a panel of old-timers only to be disappointed.

I haven’t thought about Santo in a long time. He was a great favorite of mine when I was a teen-ager. Playing softball, I used to try to manicure the batter’s box the way he did (I could do a passable impression, since it didn’t involve any athletic ability) and swing like he did (passable again) and hit like he did (a passable fantasy as long as the pitch was only going 3 miles an hour). I took it for granted he was one of the best players at his position when he played, and the numbers show he was. But he was marked as one of the guys on a team that came close but just never quite made it. I still remember the last time I saw him play. He had wound up on the White Sox after he was done with the Cubs and been stuck at second base. When he came up, the Comiskey Park fans — his home crowd — booed him; they recognized a lifetime Cub when they saw one, Sox uniform or no Sox uniform. His last time up, he lined a single to center. Maybe his only hit of the game, and just a shadow of what he’d been. But he’d done that much, anyway, to show he still had a little something left. I stood up and cheered.

Later, the Cubs hired him as a radio color guy. I’ve never been impressed by his work. Too much of a hometown clown on the air (or maybe I’ve just been won over for life by the A’s chief radio man, Bill King; but that’s another story). One of my brothers talked about seeing him outside Wrigley Field once, giving a cop a hard time as he was trying to drive through traffic, saying something like, “Do you know who I am?” He sounded like a jerk.

But the movie, mawkish as it is, changed my mind, or at least will make me think about him differently. The real subject is how he had to cope with Type I diabetes throughout his career, and more recently, how the disease caused him to have both legs amputated. He comes off as a guy with a lot of guts and determination to take on what many people — can’t tell about myself — might not be able to face. Someone else copyrighted the line, but: Check it out.

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Happy 80.5, G.E.

Back on the 2nd of the month, friend and former high school English teacher at Crete-Monee High School, G.E. Smith, was the honoree at a big bash celebrating his 80th birthday (which was actually January 2; but out of respect for the majority of humanity that doesn't want to travel to northern Illinois in the dead of winter, he waited until the unbearably hot, muggy days of early July to stage a fete). I didn't make it — new job, just returned from a trip to the Midwest, et cetera.

He had asked me to speak at the event — to be one of a panel of people who would "roast" him. Even though I couldn't go to the party, I made a last-minute stab at writing something for someone else to read. This is it:

***

From a distance of about four or five months, I loved the idea of roasting G.E. What a natural target! The first guy I knew who used a pocket protector! And who *always* carried nine or ten different pens in his shirt pocket — black ink … and blue, red, green, brown, orange, purple, yellow and … invisible.

And yeah, there was his fridge. Stocked with the full array of Ocean Spray products and maybe a pickle jar with just the pickle water still in it and some leftovers that were evolving into new life forms. He had handwritten tags on some jars — an opportunity to exercise his sense of humor. Here's a label — "gorilla beds." "Gorilla beds?" you'd ask more or less innocently. He'd look at you and say, "Ape-ricots."

Get it? And that illustrates another key facet of the G.E. persona: Unashamedly bad punster.

Of course, G.E.'s friends at the E.P.A. eventually declared the fridge a Superfund site — at least that's what the newspaper said. But not before G.E. had demonstrated to his many visitors what he suggested was a genetic capacity to eat old, over-the-hill, and past-the-expiration-date delicacies that he had aged to perfection in the ice box. Maybe he was right. He's still among us to sing the praises of moldy peaches.

So, OK, yes — there's lots of stuff you could pick out from G.E.'s curious existence and roast him for it. His shocking fashion sense, maybe. That's "fashion," in quotes. His taste for homemade recreations like yard golf. His ultralogical grading system, so massively straightforward that he'd have to pull a week of all-nighters to finish his semester grading on time. Maybe his biggest flaw is that he likes to hang out with people like us.

But the more I've thought about it and the closer the day has come, the more I feel G.E. is kind of roastproof. I mean, he's been getting roasted for years and years on a daily basis, and it has never seemed to faze him. Always the teacher, he even sent out a sheet to his "roasters" to suggest sample subjects on which he might be skewered. He helpfully listed 19 topics that might make good joke material, including quote "my philosophical, theological and moral-ethical codes" unquote.

Oh yeah! "Did you hear the one about G.E. and Ahura Mazda! It's a real side-splitter!" There — I was determined to get Ahura Mazda into the mix. G.E.'s a sucker for Zoroastrianism.

Anyway, G.E.'s roast crib sheet was his way of letting us know that anything and everything in his life is fair game so people wouldn't hold back on all the wild stuff they know about him. (He also warned about saying anything risque or using obscenities — but he forgot that we're talking about him. The most risque thing I think I've ever heard about G.E. is that he once failed to change his wiper blades on time. Mort Castle could probably turn that into a tale of terror for us.)

Now, there *is* something wild that comes through about G.E. after knowing him for a few decades — his declining, post-Eisenhower years. But it's not about any of the outward idiosyncrasies that he helpfully proposed as theme topics for his roast. By the way, G.E., you misspelled "idiosyncrasies" on that crib sheet. That's a big F-20 for you.

No, I'd say the wild thing about G.E. is that all that stuff we've been seeing — whether you got to know him as a kid running around Pleasant Hill or in the Navy Seabees or at Illinois Wesleyan or teaching back at Lexington High or holding forth at Crete-Monee or Homewood-Flossmoor or in his codger genealogist years — what we've been seeing all those years is a real, honest-to-goodness person who hasn't been afraid to be himself and to be honest with himself about who he is.

Like I said — always the teacher. And the lesson there is to live up to the injunction, whoever came up with it, to "know thyself." But that's not the wildest thing in his life, or the biggest lesson G.E. has tried to teach us.

No the biggest thing we've gotten from G.E., and the reason I think we're all here with him today, is his unfailing willingness to give to the people around him, whatever they needed, whatever was in his reach to do. Through all the years, that's the constant. He didn't list that as something to roast him about, but there it is.

All I have left to say is: Thanks, G.E.

<p>More on G.E. Smith<br />

<a href="http://infospigot.typepad.com/infospigot_the_chronicles/2006/04/a_teacher_.html " target="_blank">A Teacher</a><br /><a href="http://infospigot.typepad.com/infospigot_the_chronicles/2006/04/a_teacher_2.html" target="_blank">A Teacher (2)</a><br /><a href="http://infospigot.typepad.com/infospigot_the_chronicles/2006/06/test.html" target="_blank">In Which We Gather by the River</a><br />
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