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Birthday Eve

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My sister Ann (in fact my only sister) made an appointment for my dad to get a haircut Friday just up Western Avenue at a barber shop called Jack’s House. Since it was pushing into the 90s, it was a driving trip. I circled the block once looking for close parking before deciding the hell with it and double-parking to drop Dad off. Jack–Jack O’Kane, of the Prairie du Chien O’Kanes–saw us and came out to help.

It was a fun hour. Jack is a golfer, a Green Bay Packers fan, a son of Ireland (father’s side from Antrim, mother’s from Mayo or Sligo), and 35 years in the barber business. He did a nice job with Pop, too.

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Chicagoland Cemetery Report

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On the eve of Dadfest (his ninetieth birthday, tomorrow), I took him to a local barber for some tonsorial attention. With that seen to, we stopped at the Steak ‘n’ Shake drive-through, then headed north to intercept Sheridan Road on the North Shore. We wound up in Lake Forest, where I happened to notice a sign for a beachfront park: “Parking Entrance for Lake Forest Residents.” OK–I wanted to see what being a Lake Forest resident gets you.

I wound down a steep drive to a beautiful little beach and well-kept park and parking lot that was guarded by a young guy lounging in a lawn chair. I signaled to him we were just going to turn around and did that. I stopped and asked the guy about beach parking access. Yes, it was for residents, who could park for free. Could non-residents park there? Well, only if they have a season permit. How much is that? About $900 (and looking into things a little further, a season parking permit at the southern end of the park is $1,400). The city’s brochure on all this explains that non-residents are welcome to park at the train station in downtown Lake Forest, a mile west as the crow flies (and they’re welcome to use the beach, too, but need to pay ten bucks a head on weekends and holiday). And one last welcoming touch: Anyone who parks along any street east of Sheridan Road–close to the beach, in other words–will be ticketed and fined $125.

My beach curiosity satisfied, we continued on. Down a street marked with a “No Outlet” sign, I saw a massive gate and decided we needed to investigate that, too. It was the Lake Forest Cemetery. It’s well-tended, and many of the graves–for instance, that of 19th century wholesaling titan J.V. Farwell–are lavish.

The site above grabbed my attention. It’s the resting place of Frederick Glade Wacker, son of the man for whom Chicago’s Wacker Drive is named, and his wife, Grace Jennings Wacker–the latter once a Brooklyn Heights debutante. Their marriage in 1912 got some serious New York attention–both in The New York Times (here: New York Times wedding announcement) and in more detail in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (here: Brooklyn Daily Eagle). Mr. Wacker didn’t reach 60. Mrs. Wacker died in the 1980s at the great age of 95, if her headstone is to be believed.

The Wackers did have children. There was a Frederick Jr., a businessman and motor sports enthusiast who died in 1998. HIs obituary in the Chicago Tribune lists three children and a grandson as survivors. Not mentioned is a brother, Charles Wacker III, who happened to be out of the country when Frederick Jr. died. Perhaps he went unlisted because of the circumstances of his absence.

In 1993, Charles Wacker III, who had made a name for himself as an owner and breeder of thoroughbred racehorses, was indicted on 16 counts related to an alleged tax-evasion scheme. Here’s how the Trib summarized the case:

“In its 50-plus-page indictment, the government alleged that the 72-year-old Wacker spent a decade creating a network of dummy corporations and hidden bank accounts from North Chicago to Hong Kong to shield himself from the IRS. Federal officials also alleged that Wacker defrauded his mother, Grace Jennings Wacker, and her estate of more than $500,000.

The story notes that the government accused Wacker of running his shell game to dodge $5 million in federal taxes and–how times have changed–says that it was the most massive personal tax evasion case in the history of the federal Northern District of Illinois. Other news accounts noted that he didn’t show for his first court appearance in Chicago. He was in England, where he ran his horse operation. His lawyer told the judge he was too ill to travel.

You see something sensational like that, and you want to know more. Whatever happened to CWIII? Is he languishing in a federal penitentiary somewhere, a la Bernie Madoff? Did he beat the rap?

Well, I couldn’t find a single news source that reported the denouement of the Charles Wacker III tax-fraud saga after the accounts of that first hearing. But I did dig up something from an online federal court file.

In 2002, the U.S. attorney for the district went to court to dismiss all charges. Why? Well, Charles was a fugitive, and prosecutors said he couldn’t be found. Also, the witnesses–Wacker’s accountant and Frederick Jr.–were deceased. And at the time the charges were dismissed. Wacker was 80. The Department of Justice motion (here: Wacker dismissal) doesn’t expand on that last fact except to imply, “What’s the point of going after him now?”

Charles Wacker III will be 90 on October 21, if he’s still living. I can’t find an obit for him. But I do find mentions as late as 2007, when he would have been 85 or 86, that he was still active in the horse-racing world.

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From the Air: Green River, Dinosaur National Monument

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On Thursday’s flight from San Francisco to Chicago. Above: Just east of Vernal, Utah. The view is to the northeast, across Dinosaur National Monument. Brush Creek flows down from the left (northwest to southeast). The Green River is the main stream snaking through the center of the picture. It flows from the upper right to the lower left in this picture. At left center, the river goes through Split Mountain Canyon. At the top of the image, you can see we’re looking through a dirty window.

Below: View is to the north. The Green River flows from right to left (east to west) through Split Mountain Canyon. Split Mountain is the high, cleft behemoth on the far (north) side of the river. I can’t find the name of the dramatic ridge in the foreground; the river is just visible flowing around its left (western) end. There’s a campground right there where Kate and I had a sandwich dinner we picked up in Vernal while driving across the country in 2007.

For reference’s sake: The river at this point is at about 4,800 feet above sea level. The peaks of Split Mountain are in the 7,300-7.400 foot range, and the unnamed foreground ridge tops 7,000 feet. The portion of the ridge in the closeup is about three miles long.

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Heat Blog: Hot in Chicago

When we were in Chicago a few weeks ago, it was hot and humid virtually the entire week or so we were here. Temperatures up to the mid-90s and some real sweaty 80 to 90 percent humidity days that persisted after the heat eased a bit. At the tail end of our stay, the weather broke and highs fell into the 70s. I’m told they stayed that way until my return today, when the high downtown hit 97. Right now, it’s getting close to 1 a.m. in Chicago. The temperature: 86 degrees at O’Hare, 87 at Midway. That’s extraordinary for the middle of the night. Tomorrow’s forecast: the upper 90s again.

(Yes: I’m aware that people in Texas and the southern Plains have been going through about three months of this without a break. And yes: I enjoy our effete fog-bank summers in the Bay Area, which sometimes seem cool enough to keep your viognier nicely chilled without benefit of a fridge.)

Chicago meteorologist Tom Skilling breaks down the late-season heat wave in a post on the Chicago Weather Center super-blog:

The heat is on;Chicago is headed into the hottest opening two days of any September in 58 years!

(That exclamation point lends a certain “War of the Worlds” air to the proceedings, I think. And 58 years seems like ancient history, harking back to the days of Demosthenes or Davy Crockett. But then I remembered my mom was about two months and counting into her pregnancy with your humble blogger.)

Tom says:

It’s not at all “typical” to see temperatures here this late in the season as hot as those being predicted over the next few days. Highs are to reach 94-degrees Thursday and 98-degrees Friday. A few of Friday’s hottest temperatures could reach or exceed 100-degrees.

Back-to-back 90-degree or higher temperatures last occurred on September’s two opening days three years ago in 2008. But you have to go back 58 years—to 1953—-to find readings on September 1 and 2 warmer than those in coming days. That’s the year September opened with two 101-degree highs on the 1st and 2nd.

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Birthday Trip

One last summer trip: Off today to Chicago for my dad’s ninetieth birthday. We’ll have a party Saturday to usher him into the Brekke-Sieverson Nonagenarian Hall of Fame (you’re forgiven if you hadn’t been aware that such an august institution existed.) Looking forward to a great weekend with both my sons and my nephew Max coming into town for the occasion.

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Bridge Scene

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In the picture (at right): The suspension tower for the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, viewed from the old cantilever span it will replace. The extensions to right and left of the tower are catwalks for ironworkers and others who will be involved in stringing the bridge’s main suspension cable. (For context’s sake: that tower is 525 feet tall, and the bridge deck I was driving on was about 200 feet above the water, meaning the tower’s still out there in the distance a ways in this image.)

The new bridge will be a beauty, but the most arresting fact about it is how long it has taken to put up. The original Bay Bridge–both the eastern cantilever section and the immense double suspension section to the west–took about 40 months to build, from 1933 to late 1936. The new bridge has been under construction since 2002 and won’t be done until 2013. And it was underwent about a decade of study and design work before the first hardhat was donned on the project. Lots of reasons for that–new understanding of the seismic complexity of the site, tougher environmental regulations, more complex logistics with so much of the material for the job coming from overseas (the tower sections and most of the other steel on the structure came from China, as did some of the key construction equipment).

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Looniness of the Wrong-Way Runner

“Townspeople acting out.” That could be our town motto. But sometimes one of us emerges from the crowd of zany non-conformity to demand some wider attention and even get some. Today, that person is a guy I’ll call the Loony Runner.

I first saw him a month or so ago. His schtick is simple: He runs along the street, in the middle of the oncoming traffic lane. He is not a shy type. He seems to prefer well-traveled thoroughfares.

So far, we see just the Loony Runner, loping up our less than pristine pavements. But let’s introduce the inevitable: the drivers who are, innocently for once, motoring toward their destinations: headed for a quick stop at the boulangerie, perhaps, or going to pick up their gifted and talented child from an oboe lesson so that they’lll be on time to the Young Grandmasters Chess Club.

There they go, and here comes the Loony Runner. He doesn’t give an inch. He’s not cowed by the several thousand pounds of steel rolling toward him. When drivers don’t swerve far enough out of their lane to suit him, he delivers a crisp critique that can be heard for two or three blocks. “Asshole!” he might say. Or, “F— you, you idiot!” Or, “Bitch!” He never breaks stride.

Late this morning, he jogged down Cedar Street. I thought of snapping his picture as he went by, but thought better of it. Instead, I called the Berkeley police. The dispatcher sounded like she was humoring me–“Yes, sir, we’ll be sure to have someone check that out.” I had a feeling I was supplying raw material for one of those quaint small town police blotter columns we all love.

See you later, Loony Runner. Next time, I’m taking a picture.

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In-Flight Entertainment

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I prefer a window seat when I fly, because watching the landscape and skyscape, not the movies or seat-back TVs, is my in-flight entertainment. On my trip back from Newark earlier this week, the only window available was over a wing. Not ideal, but better than nothing. This shot is while our 737 was queuing up for takeoff.

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‘Will Rogers Says’

We came across a copy of American HIstory magazine, not among the periodicals I have heretofore perused. Among the stories the editors tease on the cover: “First Twitter: Will Rogers tweeted 85 years ago.” (Really? I was thinking Samuel Pepys [Peeps] was the first Twitterer, but then I remembered he was really the first blogger.)

Anyway, the article is not yet online. It recounts how he began sending telegrams with brief observations to The New York Times in 1920 and how that turned into a daily feature in hundreds of American papers. The article has a couple of dozen of his brief messages, that were published under the headline “Will Rogers Says.” He’s fond of taking on the wealthy, the pompous, and the Republicans of his day (the closest voice I’ve heard in our day, though one much more self-consciously political, is Jim Hightower, the Texas guy). For instance, this came a couple months after the 1929 market crash:

Beverly Hills, Calif., Dec. 25, 1929–Passed the Potter’s Field yesterday and they was burying two staunch of Republicans, both of whom died of starvation, and the man in charge told me their last words were, “I still think America is fundamentally sound.”

And another, the day after FDR took office in 1933:

Santa Monica, Calif., March 5, 1933–America hasn’t been as happy in three years as they are today. No money, no banks, no work, no nothing, but they know they got a man in there who is wise to Congress, wise to our big bankers and wise to our so-called big men. The whole country is with him. Even if what he does is wrong they are with him. Just so as he does something. If he burned down the Capitol, we would cheer and say, “Well, we at least got a fire started anyhow.”

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Witness to Terror: The Great East Coast Quake of ’11

Pre-post update: At 11:37 p.m. PDT, just as I was about to post this, we had a little five-second earthquake I could feel in Berkeley. Amazing — I felt shakes on both coasts today.

Update 11:52 p.m.: The U.S. Geological Survey says this evening’s quake was a 3.6-magnitude shake centered in the hills about 10 miles south of where we live. Translation: It was a mild event. But the Twitter reaction–the locals are falling all over themselves to report their experience–sort of proves the point of how adrenaline-producing this is even for folks who live astride dangerous earthquake faults.

Original post: I was at the airport in Newark early this afternoon, tending to a tuna fish sandwich in Terminal C and contemplating my next social media communique, when a gentle but pronounced shaking started. It went on for about 10 seconds or so and got stronger. I looked at a guy sitting near me who didn’t seem to have registered anything unusual. “I’m from California,” I said, “and out there we’d think this is an earthquake.” He looked up, but didn’t say anything. Meantime, the shaking got still more intense–by now, I knew that this wasn’t a matter of a piece of heavy equipment doing something outside the terminal. The flat-screen TV mounted near the gate started to rattle. A group of people sitting nearby started to ask, “Is this an earthquake?” I did in fact send out a Twitter message as the shaking subsided:

“At Newark airport, I could swear we just had an here in Terminal C.

OK, I concede I wasn’t really selling the story of the century there. But the shaking continued for about 10 seconds or so even after I sent the message; I would guess that I felt some movement for a full 60 seconds. Allowing for how easy it is to overestimate the duration of a temblor, I’d say now “more than 30 seconds.” In either case, that was longer than any quake I’d felt here in California since April 1984, when there was a a 6-point-plus earthquake down near Morgan Hill in Santa Clara County. I remember that quake as having last a good 45 seconds. (For comparison’s sake, the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, which was a 7.0 event, lasted 17 seconds; the 9.0 earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan last March is said to have lasted six minutes).

I didn’t see or hear any real alarm in the terminal–just excitement. Afterward, I heard many people discussing it or describing it during cellphone calls. In other words, It was a lot like the California earthquakes I’ve gotten to know since arriving here in the mid-1970s. (On Facebook, my friend Pete posted a piece from The New York Times on how the seismically-tough West Coast scoffed at the East Coast’s reaction to its less than devastating quake. Don’t buy that line at all: people here jump up and down everytime the earth gives a little shudder, and the news people here practically wet themselves every time we have a quake.)