(Author’s note: This article ran as an Opinion Piece in the Chicago Tribune on November 17th, 2022.)
She was a tall, thin, thirty-something who walked into the polling place at 6:50 p.m. on Election Day, 2022. I was standing by the door she entered, fulfilling my role as the Democratic Poll Watcher at Good Shephard Evangelical Lutheran Church in Palos Heights. She turned to me and asked with a completely deadpan face,” What are the odds that I can both register and vote in the next 10 minutes?”
I shrugged and directed her to the first of three tables set up for the three precincts assigned to this location. I noticed she held a handful of documents in one hand as she began to tell her story. The good people of the first precinct ran her driver’s license through a reader and directed her to the table of the precinct to which she belonged.
She started over with this new crew, this time producing a tax return, a utility bill, and some other documents I couldn’t see. Her plight, and the ticking clock, drew others from the poll workers’ team, all seemingly eager to get her registered in time to cast her vote before the clock struck 7 p.m. and the polls closed. They formed a small huddle around her as they worked away on her documents.
I found myself wondering why she had waited so long to do what most other voters had done weeks, months, and years before, namely register to vote. I wondered why she had waited until so late in the voting day to show up. Was she new in town? Working late? Had some sudden, very late catharsis occurred in her thought process? Had someone she cared about lit a fire under her? Had she just returned from out-of-town?
The level of activity in the polling place had picked up, not from voters, who were now mostly long gone, but from the anticipation of the volunteer poll workers who were eager to pack up and go home after a very long day. The sheer volume of tiny tasks required to end the voting day is amazing in its detail. Certain envelopes contain every conceivable result possible. Certain lists go to one office, other lists to different destinations. All the hardware and equipment needed to run the election need to be packed away in the large grey machines that will be picked up the next day. And the poll workers scurry to get it all done so they can finally end a twelve-to-fourteen-hour day.
I lost track of her until she again walked by my post, wearing an “I Voted” sticker on her jacket. She suddenly directed a beaming smile in my direction, as if to say, “Hey, this system really works.” I had to smile back at her air of confidence and gratitude for pulling off this last-minute feat of democratic privelidge. The Chief Election Judge closed and locked the doors right behind her, signally the end of the voting day.
And here’s the thing….those eager poll workers didn’t know how she was going to vote. They just wanted to make it possible for her. This little incident warmed my heart a bit. It quieted some of the rage I felt on January 6th, 2021, as rioters tore through our Capitol. It made me think that, yes, we are still a democracy.
So, for those who are still convinced that the 2020 election was stolen, here’s some free advice. Next election, volunteer to be an election judge, poll watcher, or some other role. Spend a day with your neighbors making this tedious miracle happen, and perhaps you will begin to appreciate how airtight is the voting system we enjoy in Illinois. If you are who you say you are, and your address is credible, you will get to cast your vote.
If enough believers in “The Big Lie” worked an election, we could move their misguided cause back to its last known address….on the fringes.
-Gen. Douglas MacArthur addressing a joint session of Congress upon his retirement.
(Author’s note: I wrote this story originally in 2016, and my memorable little encounter with the person featured in it seemed an already distant memory. Six years later, it seems even more distant, except in one important respect. The memories of the examples of leadership stay with you throughout your life; they shape your own behavior and actions as you try to emulate those qualities you came to admire in the superiors of your youth. God bless you General Mabry and Colonel Tkaczyk, and Lt. Col John Coruthers….I learned leadership from you.)
Fort McCoy sits in southwestern Wisconsin, roughly some forty miles east of La Crosse and the Mississippi River and nestled between the small towns of Tomah and Sparta. Today, and for the last dozen or so years, it has been the jumping off point for thousands of young soldiers on their way to Iraq or Afghanistan, although this activity has been greatly reduced. (After the U.S. quit Afghanistan, some 12,000 Afghans briefly lived there until moved to other locations.) Units would receive “acclimation” training prior to being inserted into the Mideast. When it was time to go, the presence of nearby Volk Field made it ideal for quickly deploying whole units without a big city airport scene, crying spouses, screaming children, and the press that would go with it.
It wasn’t always this way. For many years it was only Camp McCoy and the site of Annual Training, the two-week active duty obligation for National Guard units from around the Midwest. Many a vacationer can recall, and none too fondly, getting caught behind endless military convoys on their way to or from McCoy. “Summer Camp” as it was called by some, could be two weeks of fairly tiring training to keep a military unit in reasonable shape, or it could be a two-week beer blast, for the less motivated or well-led units. My unit, the 129th Infantry was squarely in the former category, thanks in no small measure to the dedication and “hands on” leadership of our commander, Lt. Col. Bernie Tkaczyk (pronounced Ta-check). He was a Korean War combat vet and he brought passion to his posting. Officers and noncoms (sergeants) who didn’t like to work or provide leadership tended to find other places to billet than under Bernie. (Col. Bernie Tkaczyk passed in 2018 and rests in the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Illinois, ironically in the same area we trained for years).
In July, 1979 I found myself in a remote corner of this post, with about 60 soldiers and noncoms reporting to me, as well as a virtual wooden wall of some 600 high explosive 81 mm rounds and about 300 illumination rounds to be disposed of in a short period of time. You disposed of them by dropping them, one at a time, down the barrel of an 81mm mortar gun tube and firing them at targets about 3,000 meters downrange, mostly old tank hulls, and, on occasion, the unlucky lost cow. (Note: No animals were harmed in the writing of this story).
That quantity of rounds might not sound too impressive, but when you factor in that each fire mission consumed only about 12 rounds and took about an hour (much less in real world firing, but we were training soldiers here and it took time), well, you can do the math. The illumination rounds were for lighting up targets for other weapons (tanks, recoilless rifles) at night, lest we get too rested in our labors.
———-
I got there via a curious route, as do many who enter the military life. In 1971 I was entering my last semester at DePaul University, was engaged to the love of my life, had been accepted for student teaching, and was poised to begin adult life. We couldn’t wait for school to end and our lives to really begin.
There was, however, the little matter of the military draft and the specter of Vietnam, which hung over most young men’s heads like a cloud. By 1971, it was obvious to everyone that we were losing, or at least not willing to win anymore. Very few people wanted to go to Vietnam in 1971. (Author’s note: Looking back over the years, it is tragic to witness how many minds and bodies that war claimed, some many years after their return)
Up until then, the deal was simple: go to college and get a student deferment, which meant you couldn’t be drafted until after you graduated and, hey, it might be over by then. Don’t go to college and you would likely be drafted within a year of high school. But that year, in an effort to level the playing field, the government ended the student deferment and instituted a lottery. I drew number 161, not immediate draft bait, but not safe either. I decided I would join the Air Force, probably having heard too many of my mother’s stories of her first husband and my brother’s father, Lt. Gilbert J. Finn, a B-29 bombardier killed over Japan near the war’s end.
After a series of written tests, eye tests, physical tests, and tests of my patience, I was informed that I would be accepted into the navigator program for B-52 bombers. I was told, and subsequently told Maureen, that our first four years of marriage were going to be in the military. She didn’t return my engagement ring, so that became the plan. When it came time to sign on the dotted line, the contract read six years, not four. I informed the officer of the obvious error, and he informed me that the government was going to invest a lot of money in my training so that I could guide a big airplane full of bombs to the right place and drop them on people we didn’t like, and that I should sign the contract. The meeting did not end well.
So, I found an Army Reserve unit on the Southeast side, did my basic and advanced training in scenic Fort Polk, Louisiana, and returned home. About a year later, my commander asked me if I wanted to become an officer, as a few slots had opened up in the Illinois Guard OCS program. I guess I was flattered to be asked, but that soon wore off as I discovered what a rigorous program it was. We started with about 90 candidates and graduated less than 50. I was one.
The one-year OCS Program, as rigorous as it was, was also the most exciting military experience I had encountered. Helicopters, radios, weapons that went boom, C-rations and all that. It was the infantry, and I was young. After a year back in the reserve unit, I applied for a transfer to the Guard, and was assigned to “ A” company of the 129th, in Elgin, Illinois. The Major who assigned me told me I was to be a mortar platoon leader. I told him I had never even seen a mortar and he looked at me as one might look upon an addled child. He suggested I get up to speed.
——————
It was a hot, humid summer day, and my crews were hard at it, sending fire mission after fire mission volleying out into the impact zone. Far behind us, larger guns were firing their ordnance into the same zone, and you could hear the big shells whooshing overhead on their way deeper into the “impact area”. It took a little getting used to.
It was about noon and getting hotter still. I told my platoon sergeant to pass the word on the sound powered phones to stand down and secure the guns, find some shade, and get some lunch. The troops didn’t need to be told twice.
A few minutes later the sound of a jeep engine could be heard coming our way. “”Visitor,” I thought, “maybe brass”. Within a short time, the jeep rounded a turn, and we could see it was a solitary soldier at the wheel, fatigues, soft cap, and no helmet, or field gear, or weapon. I knew it couldn’t be anyone important, so I returned to some form I had been filling out.
The jeep pulled up a few yards from me and the driver got out. He has an old man, short, very spare in build, wire glasses, and he smiled as he saw me. He had the two stars of a Major General on his collar.
Now there is one immutable law of the military….generals do not travel without a small circus in their wake. In that circus will be vehicles, aides, and an attractive female solider as a personal assistant and a few “strap hangers”, probably your own staff officers tagging along to mitigate what you, as an idiot lieutenant, might say or do to embarrass the unit.
His nametag read “Mabry” and he extended his hand but pulled it back momentarily to return my salute that I launched as, half in shock, I took in his rank. My platoon sergeant, having learned long ago that nothing good happens around generals, began to slink around the side of the field tent we were using to run operations. “You in charge, Lieutenant”? the General asked in a southern drawl. I told him I was, and asked him if there was anything I could help him with. I wondered if he was lost.
“Tell me what you’re doing here today”, he said in a sincere way, not like the cross-examination fashion to which I had become accustomed from previous visits by various ranking officers. I explained that this was a three-day live fire exercise.
He told me that he had been a solider since the beginning of World War II, had served a lot of years, and that he planned to retire from the service in few weeks. He wanted to spend his last few days around soldiers, and he asked me if I would mind if he talked to my soldiers by himself. Inasmuch as young lieutenants don’t disappoint Major Generals, I pointed out the line of gun crews, now consuming their C-rations and sweltering in the heat. He walked toward the first crew who, predictably, jumped to their feet as they saw the stars. He waved them off and told them to sit back down and joined them. I could see he was asking questions and appeared to be actually listening. Rare quality in a General. After a few such visits to the crews, he accepted a C-ration can from one of the men, took out his G.I. issue P38 can opener (soldiers usually wore their little can opener around their necks with their dogtags) and enjoyed some warm Del Monte peaches. You could see the men becoming impressed with his easy style. Ever more amazing.
He came back to his jeep, shook my hand, and complimented me on doing a good job and for having such fine troops under my command. He got in, smiled a sort of sad smile, put the jeep in gear and drove off into the dust. I wished him well, and cranked off my best OCS salute.
About forty minutes later the circus did appear, this time in the form of three jeeps carrying my battalion commander and most of the senior staff officers. They pulled up, jumped out and began grilling me about the General’s visit. It would seem that the good General had side-stepped convention and not made them aware of his presence. Had he done so, he couldn’t manage to do these sorts of informal visits.
Mostly, they wanted to know if I had said or done anything wrong, non-military, or just plain dumb. I told them it was mostly a non-event, although I was still impressed that he travelled alone. They informed me that he was not just anyone, but a recipient of the Medal of Honor. He never mentioned that to me or anyone else, I would later learn, during our visit.
Now in civilian life, he would be a hero maybe on the Memorial Day or the Fourth of July parade, but in the army, living Medal of Honor winners are big medicine. You get to be a certified hero 24/7. More incredible, they told me that he won it as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Hurtgen Forest during World War II. High ranking officers are mostly not in the thick of any kind of fight, so this guy must have been something very rare indeed. Al Gore had not invented the Internet in 1979, so I had to wait until I got home to look him up. You can find him easily today on Wikipedia. His full name was George Lafayette Mabry, Jr and he hailed from Sumter, South Carolina. Read his citation for The Medal and you’ll be impressed. Among other feats cited, he cleared an enemy minefield by walking through it and marking the mines. No, thank you. This was not someone you would want to piss off. (He passed in 1990 and is buried at Holy Cross Episcopal Church cemetery in Stateburg, South Carolina.)
I think back on that unusual day from time to time, on what McCoy was then, and what it is now. I think about the melancholy General Mabry closing out his long career, and just wishing to be with young soldiers once again in his twilight. And of all the young men and now women, the children of 9/11 who passed through McCoy on their way to their wars, and on their way to dangers most of us can’t even imagine. For guys like me, McCoy was a two-week exercise that kept it real, but then you went back home. For the General, it was a long goodbye after so many years of service. For those kids on their way to the Mideast, it was the first step on a journey into the unknown.
Here’s to all those who went willingly or unwillingly to their war, a war either just or unjust, but they went. Patriots, all. And a few heroes thrown in as well.
This eulogy was written last year, shortly after my brother passed on July 16th, 2021.
Over these last few months, there were a lot of things I wanted to say to my brother, but his injuries and the progression of his illness made communication pretty difficult. As some of you may know, I try to do a bit of writing, so I thought perhaps I might put in a letter some of those things I wanted him to hear. With your permission, I would like to share that letter with all of you today. It starts like this……….
“Dear Joe,”
You know it still seems funny to be calling you Joe, considering I and all the other residents of 5347 Monroe Street called you “Gil” for twenty or so years. But you deserve the right to tweak you name and be addressed as you like. After all, our mother hung some pretty interesting nicknames on most of the children, and she didn’t ask for any permission. Names like Minnie, Binky, Pood, Soona and Tassi. So, Joe it is.
I have a lot of good memories of you, Joe, but one that always makes me smile is those young years making plastic models in the converted coalbin in the basement . We made models of airplanes, jets , tanks, ships, cars, you name it. You were a better model maker than me. You had a stubborn streak that focused your attention on even the smallest detail. And you possessed patience, something I did not have a lot of.
Among your better jobs was a model of the submarine U-505, familiar to all Chicagoans because the real one sits in a museum on the South Side. As it happened, we were studying WW II in 8th grade, with each student expected to do a small presentation. I needed your U-505 model for my turn and pleaded with you to let me borrow it. I ended up going to a higher court, our mother, and you reluctantly handed over the model. I placed it in a shoebox, surrounded it with tissue, and taped the box shut, awaiting my moment in the sun the next day.
When that moment arrived, I stood in front of my classmates, removed the top, carefully reached through the tissue, and extracted…., a porcelain statue of a ballerina, which you placed the night before. Yeah, you got me on that one, Joe.
But kids grow up, and I remember the day you left us to enlist in the Army. You were 18, looked a bit nervous, but determined to enter this different world. When you came home a few months later, in uniform, you seemed much more confident, assured, and older. And you had orders for some place called Viet Nam. We did not know much about Viet Nam in 1964, but our mother knew a war when she saw one.
A few weeks later, while in the Oakland Staging area in California, you were called out of a formation and handed new orders, this time for South Korea, where you served 18 months.
It was some 35 years later, at a family gathering, that our mother casually mentioned that it was she who had those orders changed. It seems she had written Sen. Everett Dirksen, a powerful Illinois politician and she appealed under something called ‘The Sole Surviving Son” act. Due to your fathers’ death in WW II, you were exempt from serving in combat. We were dumbfounded to be sure, but I think she may have saved your life.
Like everyone, the path of your life could be altered by luck, both good and not so good luck. Surely, your luckiest day was that day you met Jeannine. Your love for each other over the years was evident to everyone who met you. Yours was a marriage that a friend of our once said was “a marriage one could envy.” And to be sure, Jeannine’s caring for you throughout this long illness has been the definition of devotion.
Less lucky was the Parkinson’s diagnosis, but throughout the last 25 years, you met it with courage, a bit of that stubbornness, and even some humor. You staved it off as long as you could through swimming, exercise classes, and even boxing. And Jeannie was by your side.
You were a good husband, a good son, a good father figure, a good soldier, and a good friend to many. And though our last names were different, you were always our brother. God bless you, Joe.
How many “standup guys” have you had the good fortune to know in your life’s journey? That person whose sense of humor, inner strength, and whose shared bottomless life experiences kept your ship upright, when events and upsets threatened to capsize your spirit. That person whose personal needs never seemed to surface. That person perhaps not at the center of your family life, but always nearby, always ready for the task at hand.
He can have any name you like, can be either man or woman, for that matter. But for me and my siblings, it was Uncle Jimmy, and this is his story…..
I can still see him in my memory, eyes focused on the task at hand, the tip of his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, the strong hands gluing or shaping some tiny part of a model ship, or airplane, or tank. He would be sitting at his kitchen table on which no food was ever served. The table was perpetually covered with model parts, or to be more precise, works in progress. And my brothers and I, also into making models in the restored coal bin just feet from his door, could often be found watching the master modeler.
He lived for a time in the perpetually damp basement apartment of our two-flat on west Monroe Street. It was in every sense a Man-Cave, in desperate need of a woman’s touch. He was in his forties at the time, still single, his parents recently deceased, and his share in the family home near Austin and Augusta sold to his recently married brother, Tommy.
He was a cop at the time, a “wagon man” in the parlance of the day. The “Paddy Wagon” as it was known back then, was a knock on the Irish, who were assumed to be drunk most of the time, and in need of transport to a jail. But the far more common use of the wagon was as an unofficial hearse for the indigent.
There wasn’t much competition for the wagon job, as the bodies of the indigent were usually located by sense of smell in alleys, gangways, and apartments with unread newspapers piled at the door.
————–
He went by various names at different points in his life. As a young man it was “Red” the typical nickname hung on a red-haired young man. The last several years on the police, he was known as “Number 1” to all of the cops in the 15th District in the Austin part of town. Annual furloughs were assigned by longevity in the district, and he was first in line for years. But he was always “Uncle Jimmy” to me, my siblings, and a small army of cousins.
———
James Oates was one of six children born to Mike and Teresa Oates. The birth order looked like this: Dolores (Dee), Rita (our mother), Evelyn (Evie), Jimmy, Tommy, and Noella (so named for her Christmas Day arrival).
Jimmy arrived in 1926, three years before the Great Depression took from this family their home, their money, and, for a time, their unity as a family under one roof. At eighteen, with World War II aflame, he enlisted in the Navy. Following boot camp in Great Lakes, he was shipped to Seneca, Illinois, a sleepy little town on the Illinois River. Seneca had a specialized shipyard, one that could turn out shallow draft, 327-foot-long ships known as LSTs, or Landing Ship Tanks.
As soon as the new ship slipped into the brown waters of the Illinois River, the recruits and their newly minted officers would join a veteran training crew. Together they began “shaking out” their just-launched vessels as they wound their way into the Mississippi River, and down to New Orleans. When the training crew finished their teaching duties, they would depart the ship, and the rookie crew would be on their own.
They sailed on into World War II in the Pacific, in time to land tanks and troops on several islands, including Okinawa, the last major invasion of the war. And those crew faced suicidal kamikaze fighters while lying beached on the shores as they scrambled to offload their human and metal cargo.
After the war, he joined the Chicago Park District Police Department, as it was then known. On December 31, 1958, the Chicago Park District Police Department was disbanded and absorbed into the Chicago Police Department.
In the mid 1960’s he met Marsha, a widow and mother of six who owned a hobby shop on Chicago Avenue. My brothers and I were thrilled that our favorite uncle living in our two-flat now had access to the models and Lionel train stuff we craved. But Jimmy was a bit gun- shy of jumping into a marriage in his forties and taking on a ready-made family. I once overheard my mother lecturing him as he agonized about what he should do. I think Marsha had given him the “fish or cut bait, sailor” ultimatum.
Happily, they married soon after and began a new life together near Belmont and Austin, where my family would move following my father’s death in 1968.
Jimmy took to fathering naturally, and to fixing up the bungalow that was now their home. His model making gradually gave way to home improvement, and he was a pretty good amateur.
As the children moved on and out, Jimmy and Marsha moved to a small home in Park Ridge. After his retirement from CP, he worked for a time as chauffer/bodyguard for Judge John Clark, a notable longtime figure on the judicial benches of Chicago’s court systems.
Marsha passed in 2008 and Jimmy in the summer of 2010.
———
Some Uncle Jimmy stories:
Delivering ‘Stiffs”
Working the “Paddy Wagon” in the 1950’as ands 60’s meant that you spent a lot of time picking up the indigent. No one wanted them, except for the owners of local funeral homes, who would be repaid by the county for a simple “no frills” burial. And they tipped the cops who brought the dead, known as ‘stiffs,” to their back doors. They actually competed for the trade and had a mutually agreed upon price under a “gentleman’s agreement.”
Pete Conboy, a second-generation undertaker and contemporary of Uncle Jimmy, told the story about Tommy Gibbons, a legendary old country Irish competitor, who let it be known among the “wagon men” that he would pay a premium to the cops for all deceased delivered to his door. Pete’s dad and others got wind of it and added an even bigger premium to the cops. Tommy folded and business went back to normal.
Ah, Chicago
Giving Uncle Jimmy his red hair back.
Late in his life, Jimmy asked me for a favor. He assumed that I was some kind of computer genius because I used computers in my business. I was not, but the notion was stuck in his head.
One day he handed me his recruit photo from Great Lakes Naval Base. This little brittle wallet size black and white photo showed him with a laconic smile on his face, navy blues and sailor’s hat. He also handed me his actual uniform ribbons from the war. “Tommy, you’re a computer genius,” he told me. “ I’d like you to use one of your computers to put my ribbons on my chest in this photo.”
How could I refuse? I ended up taking the tiny, wrinkled photo to a local portrait studio, only to find out that such requests from the old Vets were quite common. The end result was an 8 x 10 color portrait, ribbons painted in by an artist. The artist even restored his head of red hair, long since gone, as a bonus. When he asked me how I did it, I told him we a special computer for that.
The original recruit photo
Jimmy and the retouched photo (courtesy of Arthur Garceau)
Saving my butt as a teenager.
You can read more about this in an article I wrote entitled ”Send Lawyers, Guns and Money” (http://uncletommyonline.com/send-lawyers-guns-and-money-2/. The gist of the story is this: I screwed up as a teenager (robbing a parked train with some high school buddies) and Jimmy got me out of the jam.
Jimmy the cook for the masses.
Jimmy loved to cook for his family, for a family wake, holidays and all that. But let it never be aid that anyone left hungry, as I think his Navy experience dictated to him the size of the meal to prepare. His lasagna would come in epic size, often two or more pans. Italian beef would arrive in a small swimming pool of gravy. His fried chicken would make you believe that somewhere an entire coop had been destroyed.
—————-
Every family should have an Uncle Jimmy, I think. Not the actual Uncle Jimmy who graced my immediate and extended family, but that special person who helps define the best things to be found within a family. That quiet, dependable, and perpetual shoulder on which to lean. The one who serves as a sometime guide, not in the center of your family, like your siblings, but on the side, and always ready to play the role as needed.
It was in the late 1970’s and we were married about seven or eight years, when the parish priest asked my wife Maureen and I if we could help out with his weekend “Pre-Cana” conference. Would we, he asked, be the “Married Couple?”
Pre-Cana (as in the marriage feast in Cana where Jesus can’t disappoint his mom, and so turns urns of water into wine for the guests) was a program run by most parishes in Chicago as a prerequisite for a Catholic church wedding. The idea was to get the couple past the focus on the wedding day and honeymoon, and think about life together, beginning about the time you unpacked from the honeymoon and ending, well, hopefully, in that “death do us part” clause.
Pre-Cana programs lasted two days and consisted of a number of sessions in which couples would interact together on a question or issue, or consider a question separately and then report their feelings to their partner.
An example of a couple tackling a question together might be “How long do we want to wait to start a family? Do we even want a family?” An exercise to be started individually (boys in one room, girls in another), and then dealt with together might read like “List three things that you would like to see your partner change or eliminate from their character.”
Some of those little tasks could lead to a frank discussion between the soon-to-be partners. Some of them started disagreements. Sometimes there were tears. A few times, a partner would storm out.
Peppered into the program were films, talks from the priest, and little presentations by “experts” like us. The priest who recruited us explained that engaged couples tended to listen better to folks a few years older than themselves, than they did their parents. We were considered older, but still “cool.”
We were both teachers when we started out, and we knew just how fast kids could tune you out. If you began spouting platitudes and advice, “cool” young couple or not, they would switch you off within the first five minutes.
So, we decided to have a little fun and present ourselves as “Bill and Betty Happiness, the Perfect Married Couple.”
Our audience consisted of about eight couples who ran the gamut of most engaged couples in the 70’s. There were the Lovebirds, hands welded to each other’s, eyes continually locked. There were the Indifferents, both pretty sure they had all the answers, and letting you know with every gesture and glance that you were probably wasting their time. There were the Bickersons, getting a jump on disagreeing with each other in public prior to a lifetime together; also, the Parent-Child couple, the female usually playing Mom to Junior’s willingness to follow orders and avoid the burdens of conscious thought. And there were a few people so comfortably in love with each other that it was warmed your heart and brought a smile to your face.
We came onstage holding hands, sitting on stools next to each other and proceeded with our over-the-top rules for a long and happy marriage. The rules were a blend of our own experiences, some sincere beliefs, and some just good old-fashioned tips.
I can’t remember all of what we tried to sell them on that long-ago day, but here are few of the best ones……….
“You’re not that fascinating”
You’re young, you’re in love , but you don’t need to be in each other’s faces 24/7. Give each other some space. It gives your mutual love some fresh air and time to grow. Spend time on our own with others.
“Go to be bed mad.”
Somebody probably told you never to go to bed mad. They were wrong. Go to bed before you say those ugly things you don’t really mean. Things will look different in the morning when the anger cools.
“It’s your home, not his mother’s. Or her mother’s.”
Build your own nest your way.
“Money.”
Unless you are wealthy, and most people are not, don’t let money define your relationship. Agree on what you should spend your money on and don’t make a major purchase on your own.
“Kids”
Don’t let mom and dad order up some kids. Start your family when you are ready.
“Don’t ever run down our spouse in front of others. Ever.”
“You’re not the smartest person in the room.”
Ask your partner what she or he thinks.
Actually, our little act was well received by our young audience. We got some chuckles and a few laughs. Even the Bickserons stop sniping at each other. And, who knows, maybe they even listened.
————-
If you have been lucky enough to have your love by your side for fifty years, you are among the luckiest people in the world, as Barbara Streisand sung. To have your marriage grow as both of you become different people many times over is no small feat. To fall in love again and again with those different versions of you and your partner as they appear is rare indeed.
To move from being just you yourself to being one-half of a couple, through parenthood, careers, setbacks, losses, successes, illness, the happy magic of grandparenting, and more is, at the end of the day what marriage is. It begins with love and passion and grows into the deepest friendship most of us will ever know.
Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet was all the rage in the 1970’s; he could have been describing marriage when he wrote:
“And let your best be for your friend.
If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.
For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?
Seek him always with hours to live.
For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.
And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter and sharing of pleasures.
For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”
Day or night, it was an amazing vista, the ever-changing skyline of one of the world’s great cities…Chicago. From 2000 until we sold our condo at 15th and State Street in 2018, it was our view, and it never got old.
Our condo started out as a weekend retreat for my wife and I, a bit of “alone time” from our three children who were hovering at various heights of finishing their educations, finding a life partner, and launching. An excellent time for a weekend getaway address; I heartily recommend it for those of you in that life-stage.
The South Loop was beckoning, in its early stages of gentrification. The Printer’s Row area, in particular, was jumping. I knew and had worked the area selling typesetting there in the 1970’s. Back then it was dirty, scruffy, and industrial, and I could never imagine wanting to live there. It was printers, lithographers, typesetters, and related print trades, all thriving, and unable to see the dawn of the digital age and of the Internet that would render their products and services obsolete. Many of the buildings still bear the names of the companies that built them. Our building was built as a frozen food warehouse for Meadowgold Butter. Old time Rock Island Line riders recall seeing that big butter sign for years.
What these buildings had in common was that developers bought them at the low end of their value, gutted them to remove all traces of industry, and built out condos or apartments that appealed to both “fifty-somethings” like us, or parents of students enrolled at more than a dozen downtown colleges. Views were important, but so were amenities. In-building restaurants, workout rooms, party rooms and decks drove the buyers in big numbers.
I remember feeling blessed to be able to afford such a view. Business was good. We loved walking all around downtown, the art fairs, new restaurants opening almost weekly, even the Catholic parish of Old Saint Mary’s, once the ugliest church in town at Van Buren and Wabash, now reborn in splendor at 15th and Michigan. At the invitation of the pastor, Maureen signed our names onto the concrete floor underneath the tile of the sanctuary, so I guess we were among the first there.
We loved showing off our view to anyone and everyone who wanted to come downtown. It even gave us a little bit of a “cool factor” with our friends, most of whom lived in the burbs, and perhaps thought of us as adventurers.
My mother sent us a card when we closed on the condo, congratulating us on our “additional home” as she put it. It had us wondering what “additional” meant. Were we showing off, was it something we did not deserve? But when her sister Evie came to town, she could not wait to get her down there, to showcase her “successful” kids. Ah sisters. Do they ever stop competing?
—————–
The Lights………
I remember watching a violent summer storm as it swept through downtown. Bolts of searing white lightning struck the huge white antennas on top of Sears tower. The lightening seemed to strike every 30 seconds or so. And when it did touch, the blinding white streak lingered two or three seconds, as if it took a little time to offload its raw energy into the building.
One of my favorite summer activities was helping to land commercial aircraft as they reached for O’Hare. Their lights would appear in the west, seeming to drop from the blackness above them, as if they were parachute flares fired from some celestial mortar.
They would form a yellow-white necklace of lights, five miles apart up there, but appearing to be part of the same string from my balcony. The string would head east over the lake, then slowly turn north, then west, and begin to descend out of sight somewhere on the north side.
I knew those pilots needed my guidance, which I freely offered, wineglass in hand.
In the early years, before the architectural explosion stole our view to the northeast, we would watch fireworks weekly throughout summer. It got to the point where you sort of took it for granted. Afterwards, we discovered that the glass exterior of Trump Tower acted as movie screen of sorts, and we watched real-time reflections of those same fireworks.
Lights could be funny at times. Our bedroom was a partition walled room, about eight feet high in a twelve-foot-high loft. The north facade was all glass and when a southbound Rock Island train came by at night, its oscillating headlamp raced above our heads and made crazy lighted patterns above us.
Two mornings a year, in January, when the sky was clear and the conditions were right, a beam of blinding light from Trump Tower pierced right through our condo. It lasted only a few minutes, but it was like trying to look into the sun itself.
The office lights at night in the skyline told a different story. The unseen workforce of cleaning workers would turn whole floors on or off as they labored all night.
The Sounds……
The South Loop seemed loud at first, then a bit quieter, and then your mind tuned the sounds out altogether. The Orange and Green Lines of the CTA shared elevated tracks across State Street. They rumbled and squealed by almost as frequently as that “El” in the Blues Brothers apartment. And the Red Line ran silently under our building on its way to Cermak and the south side, or downtown and to the northern city limits.
Throw in the parade of firetrucks, ambulances, police cars, street traffic below us and commercial aircraft above us, and you had a perfect storm of noise. Only we stopped hearing most of them after a while. They blended into our unconscious as loop dwellers.
And I recall the deafening silence that followed 9/11 for several days: an eerie and mournful absence of life and activity.
The wind…….
There were many times we could observe “lake effect” snow clouds high up and out over Lake Michigan, held offshore by winds aloft and destined to be dumped on unlucky Hoosiers to our south and east.
The cranes also acted as wind indicators, at least on the weekends. The crane operators unlocked the cranes when they were not lifting, and they tended to rest in the path of least resistance from the wind. So, if all the cranes on a Saturday were pointed east, you knew the winds were out of the west. An expensive weathervane, to be sure.
Cranes were also indicators of both atmosphere and finances. From 2001 until 2008, one could count at least a dozen construction cranes from our deck. We watched as our original view all the way to the colorful lights of Navy Pier slowly vanished as the cranes spun their webs of glass and steel into taller and taller buildings. And in the spring of 2008, when everything crashed into the Great Recession, the cranes went away. By 2015, they were coming back and are adding to their number to this day.
The people…….
Life in an area so densely populated as the South Loop is a daily immersion in the diversity of the city itself. Your fellow building occupants, the building staff, pedestrians who share the sidewalks and parks with you, shopkeepers, eatery staffs; White people, Black people, Asian people, Muslims, and Hispanic people, all interacting every day. Medical workers, office workers, first responders, salespeople, educators, and retail workers were your neighbors, and the racial stereotypes of your old neighborhood did not apply much. The black man down the hall who played classical piano was a surgeon. The gay couple upstairs were successful realtors. The Korean woman who ran the in-house cleaners read classic literature when not waiting on you. If nothing else, it helped to keep your mind free of first impressions and faulty stereotypes.
These are among my favorite “people” memories of the South Loop….
Thanksgiving dinners in Tapas Valencia Restaurant The owner of this “small plate” restaurant in our building sponsored a free turkey dinner for the needy each Thanksgiving. The needy came in many varieties: the obviously poor, large immigrant families, the guys from nearby Pacific Garden Mission, women from battered women shelters, and some folks who could clearly afford a meal, but just wanted to share the day with someone. The restaurant managers, Jose, asked the residents to volunteer to wait tables, bartend, and buss tableware. We worked under the supervision of the young people who waited on us every time we ate there, which was often. It was a day of reversed roles for all involved, and it was fun.
Our condo balcony was right near the larger building patio, or party deck. If a wedding reception were in full swing on the big deck, revelers were only fifteen feet away and would invite us to join them. I am embarrassed to say how many times we accepted.
One summer day, we witnessed the unusual sight of dozens of people walking on the elevated tracks, accompanied by police and firefighters. Behind them was a vintage “el” train, circa 1940’s or 50’s. As it turned out, the people were “train buffs” who had paid for a special ride on the old train. When it broke down above 14th street, they had to walk to the Roosevelt stop. When we encountered them on the street level, they were in “train buff heaven.” They were absolutely thrilled.
Early Saturdays in May and again in October, the bridges went up to accommodate the Lake Michigan boaters on their way upriver, whose tall masts needed the clearance. The annoyance of the less privileged in their stalled cars inevitably degraded into group horn honking, growing in intensity as the time passed.
Public disturbances were common and came in several varieties. First, real protests for almost any cause you could think of, attended by a patient, if somewhat bored, police force, protecting their 1st Amendment right to peaceful protest. Megaphones were your first clue.
Columbia College art projects could easily be mistaken for a riot. My favorite was the twelve students dressed as a single caterpillar, slinking down State Street. The third type were Indian weddings, usually near the Hilton. The key players were the guests, often more than 150 of them, chanting, ringing bells, and clapping as they circled the hotel several times. The object of all this craziness was the groom, wearing colorful Indian garb and sitting astride a white horse, gilded in gold. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere but there.
The homeless, were, of course, everywhere. For a time, they lived near the south branch of the Chicago River in a small tent city. They could be found in every park, especially in warm weather. As it turned cold, they sought the overhead cover of viaducts from 18th Street to Foster Avenue, far to the north. It was good to see the cops checking on them near the river each night and to read of a remarkable dentist who shelled out $200 each night to bring them McDonalds coffee, burgers, and blankets.
The beauty…….
There was so much of it…….
The great skyline itself at sunset and after dark as the lights came up, Maureen turning our little deck in to a blazing garden each summer, the rebirth of the River and the coming of the Riverwalk, concerts in Millennium Park, the art fairs, and so much more.
By 2018 it was time for us to go: our ages, the need for more space, proximity to the kids and grandkids, lowering our financial load as we contemplated retirement and, yes, personal safety, all factored in. And it was good to begin again, this time in the peaceful and quieter southwest suburbs.
Chicago gets a bad rap in the world’s press, but it is one of the world’s great cities, and for a time we lived right in the middle of it. Our South Loop years were among the best of our lives.
I have so many happy memories from my childhood, memories that even after more than a few decades can still bring about an easy smile, or even an outright grin.
Memories of Christmas mornings with my brothers and sisters, trying with all our collective might not to descend upon a mountain of gifts in the living room, before the first light of day showed itself.
Memories of the last day of the schoolyear, with freedom beckoning, and endless summer days of baseball in the alley. Swimming in “batches” at Columbus Park, and getting to sleep on the back porch of the two-flat, the most coveted of berths in an age before air conditioning.
But there is one memory that come most easily and most often. The memory is seated in the annual family vacation, for many years in Sister Lakes, Michigan. Over the years my family rented cottages from two other families, who were also friends of my parents. In earlier years it was the Hayes Family on Little Crooked Lake. The cottage we rented had a name: Myrtle’s Place. In later years, and the more memorable years for me, we rented from the Clancy family on Round Lake, in a little group of family-owned cottages called Clancy’s Camp Geraldine.
A family with eight children leaving home for two, and sometimes three weeks, is quite an undertaking. The entire week before departure was filled with preparations including housecleaning, shopping, packing, prepping the fishing gear, tuning up the old Chevy; and then finally, on a magic Saturday morning, starting out.
In those days, the one-hundred-and-ten-mile trip took about five hours, given the partially built Interstate system, and stopping for breakfast at Ritter’s Restaurant in Stevensville. My boredom with the highway travel was like most kids’ travel boredom. “Are we there yet?” has been passed from one generation of kids to another. I am guessing that some bored Roman kid in the back of a chariot asked the same question.
My travel boredom suddenly dissipated, and my excitement began to kick in when we finally reached the exit for Napier Avenue, 12 miles out from Sister Lakes. It elevated once again when we passed The Pearl Grange, eight miles out. Then another jump at Spinks Corner, six miles out. I could barely contain myself as we crossed Pipestone Road, three miles out.
It was coming. The last landmark of mounting excitement was the Sister Lake Laundromat, about a mile from the crest of the last hill. And as the old Chevy lumbered up to the top of that last hill, you held your breath as the vista as last appeared below you.
The lake in all its sunlit glory burst into view, framed by an ageless red barn on one side and migrant workers toiling on the strawberry crop on the other. You could make out a little ice cream and bait shop on the shore called Dill’s Landing. And your young heart began to sing, because this was the beginning of vacation, that wonderful time of swimming and fishing and hiking and fireworks and that most precious gift to little boys: freedom.
To be honest, years later, when it was my turn to drive the car as a husband and father, I had to try to conceal the same youthful glee when we crested that same hill. I wondered whether those young faces in the back seat felt like I did, both when I was their age, and in the moment.
———————
Since St. Patrick’s Day, our lives have been defined, and limited, by Covid-19. We are isolated, lonely, often bored, seeking new ways to fill our days. Some of us are out of work, some of us are hungry, and some of us are broke, and in need of help.
We survived the spring, began to struggle free in the summer to enjoy tented restaurants, virtual baseball on television, and smaller family get togethers. But in the absence of any clear and competent national leadership, the message was garbled. Travelling through Door County Wisconsin in July, my wife and I dined in some great restaurants with tight safety protocols in place. We felt safe. A few days later, in Sheboygan County, we found ourselves in the Wild West. Mask-less serving staff chatting you up a few inches form your face, crowded bars, groups of twenty at large tables. We left early for Chicago.
About half the country, much of it rural or politically oriented, turned its collective back on the scientists. Wearing a mask marked the team you played for, and probably tagged you as a regular viewer of FOX or CNN/MSNBC. A motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, bare-faced Trump rallies, ultra-right-wing marches, and countless weddings, parties, defiant restaurant owners, and small-town mayors all called it a hoax. Throw in a few state governors in denial and the gun was loaded, cocked, and ready to fire.
Now the gun has fired, is firing still. We got pretty much what Dr. Fauci and company told us we would get. We will likely see 500,000 dead by April 1st, 2021. Almost unthinkable.
Even the most delusional of governors are now back-peddling, trying to put the genie back in the bottle; but the genie has escaped and is doing her worst, and still the deniers persist. Recently, Frank Bruni, a New York Times writer, echoed the words of a front-line nurse in South Dakota, perhaps the epicenter of delusional pandemic behavior. In describing her most adamantly delusional COVID-19 patients, she said, “They shout at us that they don’t have COVID and berate us for wearing our PPE because it’s a hoax. Only when we intubate them, do they stop shouting.” Powerful stuff.
————–
In these last few weeks, I sense a slight movement upward, and perhaps toward the crest of a different kind of hill. The void in national leadership will soon end and adults are already filing into the room. Several promising vaccines are here, with more coming. The deniers will continue to deny, and surely many will resist the chance to get inoculated. But most of us will jump at it.
The crest of this new hill beckons and when we complete the first round of vaccinations, it will feel like the Napier Avenue exit, twelve miles out. And when the other vaccines come online, it will feel like The Pearl Grange, eight miles out. And when the schools reopen, it will feel like Spinks Corner was reached, six miles out. Travel plans will feel a lot like reaching Pipestone Road, and when the pandemic drops off the front page, we will have almost crested the hill, right near the laundromat.
And what is on the other side? What great prize awaits us?
In a word, touch. What we long for more than anything is to touch again. The touch of a simple hug or handshake. The touch of a kiss. The touch of being in a crowded room, a restaurant, a theatre, a concert. The touch of a crowded ballpark, the touch of family gatherings.
We will regain the touch of human interactions in actual meetings in a room, absent the lack of tone of Zoom meetings and email strings.
We will revel in chatting with folks at an adjacent restaurant table, mask-less and carefree. And we will tip more easily and more generously, remembering how these workers took the brunt of the pandemic.
We will trade baseball talk with total strangers at a ball game, as we pass their beers down to them from the beer vendor in the aisle, and then pass their money back to the vendor. A remarkable exercise in trust.
Our kids will feel the touch of social warmth and comfort and happiness of a well taught classroom. That is, once they get over having again to get up early for school.
We will be less aloof in crowded elevators, unafraid to make eye contact, or trade light commentary, simply happy to be in a crowded elevator.
We will take in the joy of a family gathering, perhaps less eager to make a point, or exercise on old complaint. Happily content to be together to mark a birthday, a graduation, or a holiday. We will not have to hide our private worries about where or who you might have been too close to in the week before.
We will rediscover the simple joys of entertaining and showing off our homes at their best. We will put out the folding chairs, the fold-up tables, the extra dishes and flatware, and the serving platters that have sat too idle for too long.
Our medical professionals will begin to relax, knowing they met the challenge. They will slowly leave behind the triage nightmare and they can return to the much more rewarding business of restoring health.
We will see ambulances go by, and silently thank those paramedics who served throughout this time.
We will sit in Millennium Park and many other parks, and take in a concert, grateful for shared summer nights and the joy of music.
We will smile at each other as we walk our streets and pathways, silently acknowledging the simple privilege of not having to move to the other side of the road as we pass.
And those of us who are church-goers will gladly extend a hand in peace to those around us.
We are not at the crest of the hill yet, not by any means. But we are slowly moving up that hill. We will soon begin to feel our hearts glow again, slowly at first, and then increasing, as we pass the landmarks of isolation and move toward the joys of touch. It will be a Happy New Year.
I have been a dad for so long now, I sometimes forget that I was once a son. That’s seems like a long time ago, and it was, but the memories of being my father’s son are a bit complicated, because in a very real sense I and my siblings had two versions of the same father.
Tom Wogan, my Dad, and my namesake was born in 1917, the second of two boys. His father would die in May of 1918, just prior to the Spanish Flu pandemic. He died of tuberculosis, as did many Irish immigrants. My dad never really had a father of his own, and I think in a way it made him stronger, but also gave him no model on which to build his own notion of fatherhood. He was first a and foremost a Chicago Fireman, but he had delivered ice, driven cabs, 18-wheeler trucks, and near the end of his life funeral hearses. He worked two jobs almost his entire life to care for his family.
I remember him in many ways from back then………….
I think my earliest memory of my dad was in Lake Delevan, Wisconsin when I was about four years old. We rented a cottage called “The Lazy Daze” and our little family (then probably 6 or 7 in number, including the parents) was on one of our annual vacations at a lake. My parents came in from a party and they were laughing and happy and they brought in red helium balloons which fascinated me. He chucked me on the cheek as I lay in my bunk bed and handed me one of the balloons. The string was still in my hand the next morning, but the balloon had expired and was hanging below my bunk.
I see him tip-toeing around the second-floor window ledges of our two flat, changing out the storm windows with the grace, but certainly not the build, of a ballerina, while the neighbors watched in horrified anticipation that he would fall. He never did.
I see him on the golf course in his white t-shirt and black slacks (shorts were for sissies, I was told), taking a swing at a golf ball. He would stride up to it, with his short, square frame, plant his feet, take no practice swing, and then suddenly attack the ball like it owed him money. Sometimes a great shot, sometime not so much, but he loved the game, and he liked having me along for nine holes. And I have been trying to get him out of my own backswing for many, many years.
Though short, he was tough. Once I witnessed a verbal argument between my Dad and a fellow I considered to be a war hero, as he had served in the 82nd Airborne in the war. The guy was clearly intimidated and, though nothing came of the argument, I was confused. My Uncle Jimmy straightened me out. “Your Dad is a tough guy, Tommy,” he told me. It was like a revelation.
My Dad had no fuse. He could be angered quickly and was not averse to throwing a punch. I think my younger brother Bill, who we lost in 1979, had the same mercurial makeup. I know I don’t. And yet he made friends easily and could be quite outgoing. Over a two-week vacation in Wisconsin, he started a lifelong friendship with a local bar owner named Gus Oberg. His many friends were lifelong companions from his youth and playing baseball.
He could be loving in his own way. When I was seven or eight, I screwed up and lied about it. We were vacationing on Lake Michigan and the lake was well below the bluff on which the cottage lay. He asked me to run up and bring down a tackle box, which I did, but I left the tailgate window up and open on the 1955 Chevy wagon. A thunderstorm came up and the back of the car got soaked.
He asked me if I did it and I denied it, knowing full well that it could only be me, as everyone else was down at the beach. For two days I denied it and he would not budge. I was grounded in the cottage. Even my mom started to lobby for my case, but he was adamant. Finally, I tearfully broke down and confessed. He took my by the shoulders and said, “OK, I just wanted you to tell the truth. Now go play’”. In all these years, I have never forgotten that lesson of tough love.
——————
In the summer of 1960, Dad had a cerebral accident, or stroke, one scary morning in Sister Lakes. We kids were scattered to other families for a few weeks before he was brought home. I next saw him in a wheelchair when he returned from the hospital. He looked smaller, tired, and a bit confused. I was afraid to go near him because he did not look like the robust, outgoing Dad I knew from just weeks before. And I was ten.
He was the same Dad, but different. He still worked full time, but he was more vulnerable, more emotional, at times, less able to control his anger. But in this altered persona was a Dad who learned to accept little acts of kindness, to let some of us do the heavy lifting now and then. He could also be sentimental. When the 1967 snowstorm hit Chicago, my brothers and I dug out the alley to allow him to get his car into the garage. He was so proud of us he teared up, something you would have not seen before the stroke.
And then there was the infamous incident in which my mother’s typewritten manuscript caught a gust of wind while on our way to Michigan. It was her story of her first marriage to 1Lt. Gilbert Finn, killed in 1945 over Japan. For reasons I never understood, other than his temper issues, he wouldn’t stop the car, claiming it was unsafe. My mother was distraught, seeing hours of work on her trusty Underwood typewriter suddenly gone. My sister Maureen sent her young husband Pat on an unsuccessful recovery mission of some 50 miles roundtrip, but the manuscript had scattered to the winds.
(Authors’ note: Mom rewrote her story in a very moving letter to her late husband on what would have been his 75th birthday. Syndicated columnist Bob Greene ran it in place of his own column one day and it appeared in most major newspapers.)
Once we drove to the south side to see Dad’s cousins, the Becks. Leaving the Dan Ryan at 99th Street, an older, somewhat frail gentlemen behind us misjudged his stopping distance and bumped our car. Dad blew up, and started out the driver’s side door, murder in his eye. My mother nudged me, then at age 17, to stop him, which I did, but barely.
——————-
The medical world can do so much more for stroke victims today than they could in 1960. By 1968, the stroke caught up with Dad, and one July night, he fell in the living room, gone within a few minutes.
By far the more enduring image of my dad comes from those later years. I see him with his coal black hair, his olive skin, looking more Italian than Irish. I see him at the bar in Wallace’s Tavern at Adams and Laramie in his dark trousers, white t-shirt, smoking his Salem cigarette, and drinking his cold Budweiser. He is shooting the breeze with one of the other regulars, while being served by Ding Dong, the bartender. (See my article on “Joints” to learn more about” Ding Dong.”)
I see him relaxing on the bench outside the cottage at Sister Lakes or hanging on the street level patio with the other “Camp Geraldine” guests, firemen and policemen all. I see him at his firehouse, polishing the chaplain’s “buggy” as the car was called. I see him surprising my mom and all the guests of the “Fireman’s Club” by coming out of the bedroom costumed as “Reginald Van Gleason,” a Jackie Gleeson character of that time.
Both versions of Dad had this in common: He loved his wife, loved and was very proud of his family, was a courageous firefighter, a tireless provider, and a good man. Was he perfect? No, but then who perfects fatherhood? Certainly not me.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad.
Some Dads stories……………………
He was stationed at a firehouse at Pulaski and Wilcox, known as “95’s House.” Workmen were replacing the windows along the side of the firehouse and, as it happened, the new windows were longer than the opening for the old ones. The workmen were chipping out bricks at the base of the old windowframe, when a passerby asked his firefighter buddy, Jim McInerny, why they were doing that. Jim, a consummate wise-guy fireman, replied, within earshot of my Dad,” So Wogan can see out.” My Dad was not pleased.
He played football at Saint Philip High School at Jackson and Kedzie and once told me the story of how the coach told him to “take care” of his opposite number on the gridiron. So on the next play, as the ball was snapped, he stood up and punched the hapless player in the nose. He was ejected from the game, but was convinced he did what his coach asked.
He had a burn scar on his left thigh, roughly the size of a dinner plate. I thought he got it from a fire when I was little, but my mother told me the story of what really happened. My Dad and his only sibling, Uncle Bill, once hung around with a kid they called “Terrible Tommy Finn.” He was terrible indeed, pouring gasoline on my Dad’s pants, and causing the burn, tricking Uncle Bill into looking into an open fuel cannister and then tossing a match in afterward, burning Bills face. His finale involved accidently killing some poor guy on a hunting trip by firing a shotgun as the victim slept on a couch.
Cars were important to him and when I earned my driver’s license, we had a lot of fights. I once asked a girl to a dance and we had a three-day running battle over my borrowing the 1963 Pontiac Catalina. My mom finally got him to relent, but the next day when he discovered a pack of Marlboro cigarettes on the front seat (mine), he came upstairs like Christ into the temple and my mom had to calm him down again. This from Mr. two-packs a day of Salems.
He had a sense of the layout of Chicago that would rival Google Maps. In the days when he drove the Fire Department Chaplain, Monsignor William Gorman, they would be on their way to a fire. The good Monsignor, who had no sense of direction, telling him where to turn. And Dad was not able to correct the obvious errors. Invariably, they would be lost, and Monsignor would say “Well, Tom, we made a mistake. “
In his last years, while driving funeral livery, which understandably is day-to-day work, he was always happy to get “a trip” as he referred to a funeral assignment. The calls usually came in around dinnertime and he had given a private phone line to his network of funeral directors. We quickly named it the “deadline.” Unfortunately, my sister Rita also gave the number to her friends. One evening, as the phone rang and he jumped from the table, happy to have work for the next day, the caller asked for Rita. Everyone ran for cover.
Comedian Chris Rock once quipped, “The way to stop the killing is to make bullets cost $5,000 each” I think he was on to something.
I published this original article almost two years ago, but after this last week in El Paso and Dayton, I felt the need to add to it and try again, for whatever it’s worth.
In November of 2017 I wrote that some 26 church-going people in Texas had been gunned down by a madman using a weapon that used 5.56 millimeter (also known as .223 caliber) military style ammunition. The month before that, another madman in Las Vegas used the same ammunition, plus 7.62 millimeter and a few other types to kill 58 and injure more than 500. Before that it was the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando and 49 dead (9 millimeter and 7.62 millimeter), Virginia Tech with 32 dead, (.223 and .22 calibers) and Sandy Hook Elementary with 27 dead, 20 of them children (223 caliber). The list is endless, including Columbine’s 13 dead (9 millimeter), Aurora, Colorado, 12 dead (.40 caliber and .223 caliber) and on and on. In most cases, very large quantities of legally purchased ammunition were part of the story.
Since that time, add these to the list………….
May, 2018 10 dead/ 14 wounded in Sante Fe, Texas (.38 cal. and shotgun)
October, 2018 Pittsburg, PA synagogue, 11 dead/6 wounded (.223 and 357 semi automatic pistols)
We all know the drill: prayers for the families of the victims, endless speculation from the cable news for days, interviews with the killer’s neighbors, protestations from the NRA that “guns don’t kill people” and then wrapping themselves in a misinterpreted meaning of the 2nd amendment. Within two weeks it’s on to the next story.
And on the South and West sides of Chicago, it’s a daily dose of shootings, mostly 9 millimeter and .380 caliber and .22 caliber ammunition.
Ok, I get it. No politician who wants to get re-elected is going to take on the NRA. No one part of the country agrees with the rest of the country on just what form of gun control, if any, will make a difference. The NRA will insist it’s all a matter of fixing mental health. A hunter in Tennessee just won’t see it the same way as an accountant in Milwaukee. And you can buy guns of all types with minimal controls at any level.
There are an estimated 300 million handguns, rifles, and shotguns in private hands in the United States today. Estimates of ammunition purchased each year are between 10-12 billion (that’s with a “b”) rounds. We are awash in firearms, bullets and shells. And bodies.
There is a solution out there and I’m not the first to suggest it, but I might be the first one to lay out the steps of the plan. The solution: treat the most deadly ammunition the same way we treat powerful drugs that require a doctor’s prescription. Start to choke off access to the most lethal ammo.
It might take two years to seriously dry up the supply of the most deadly rounds, but it would work. Maybe we can’t stop the guns, (hell, we couldn’t even keep from repealing the automatic weapons ban!) but we can sure limit their destructive power by implementing this plan. Guns are protected by the NRA and they are very durable items. They tend to hang around for years. Ammunition, however, is an expendable, and is not directly addressed under the 2nd amendment. Because it is expended, you can impact its availability.
——————
Here for your consideration is my plan. I welcome your critiques, arguments, and comments.
1.Dry up the supply.Recognize that certain type of ammunition need to be controlled, because they are overwhelmingly used in homicides and mass shootings. Get them off the retail market, both in stores and online. They include:
9 MM
7.62 MM
.223 CAL
.380 CAL
.45 CAL ACP
.22 CAL
This means that within a defined period of time (90-180 days), these ammunitions come off the retail shelves and the Internet. This also means that all other types of ammunition are unaffected by this law. You can buy all the shotgun shells, 30.06 rounds, etc. you want (subject to local regs) for hunting, sporting clays, whatever. These rounds aren’t the problem; they mostly kill deer, birds, and clay pigeons. Happy hunting.
2. Exempt the military and recognized, taxpayer-supported law enforcement from this plan.
3. Buy it all back. Task the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Bureau (ATF) to purchase from suppliers who need to purge their shelves of the munitions at full retail value. These bullets are now part of the controlled resale process and available for resale.
4. Make it financially attractive to dump your privately held ammo. Allow private gun owners six months to turn in their munitions in these categories to the ATF for a premium price (5x retail value initially, dropping to 4x, 3x, 2x, each month.) The ATF destroys these rounds. The premium is designed to discourage hoarding ammunition and to reduce the regulated rounds to a minimum.
5. Pick the agency. Charge the ATF with establishing an easily referenced national database of gun owners with FOID number, including all guns using these restricted ammunitions by serial number, and amount on hand for each weapon. Require owners of these weapons to log on, add their guns by serial number and declare how many rounds they own for each. (They’ll quickly figure out that they don’t have to be honest about how many rounds they have on hand so they can buy a few more.) If you’re not on the registry, no ammo for you.
6. Dangerous ammo is available only at ranges. License the future sales of all restricted ammunitions to licensed local shooting range operators. In other words, these munitions may only be purchased at the range for use at the range. Brass is turned in and weighed against purchased amount, much as has been done on military ranges for years. You want to expend 2,000 rounds at the range, great. You will need to buy your rounds there and to turn in your brass casings for a weight check prior to leaving. Rounds-to-casing weight charts already exist.
7. Assuming most gun owners will claim no ammo on hand when they register their guns, allow up to twenty rounds to be purchased (again, available at local ranges) per owner per weapon, amount logged onto the owners’ account at time of issue. You can take these home, but expended casings will be required for resupply of this ammunition. So if you fire 10 rounds from your doorway at a home invader, illegal immigrant, neighbor who came over to borrow your lawn mower, ISIS infiltrator, or Trumpian fantasy, you will need to gather up your brass if you want to replace your ammo. Assuming, of course, you don’t go to jail.
8. Build into the database the ability to transfer or sell such weapons as long as the new owner becomes listed on the database. Rounds must be transferred with ownership and logged to the new owner.
9. Create severe legal and financial penalties for anyone caught trafficking, reselling, or hoarding restricted ammunitions after the first year. Task the ATF to bear down on gun shows and the fringe right groups, the most likely offenders. Possibly place a rewards system in place for turning in known hoarders.
10. Don’t sell ammo of any type to any and all on the existing national database of people who shouldn’t buy guns. Merge that group onto the ATF database.
—————
Here’s what I think would happen…
Within two years, it would become very difficult to amass 2,000 rounds of the restricted types of ammunition.
Would hoarding occur? Yes, but it would be largely on the political fringes, the paranoid Americans building compounds, who would now face criminal charges if caught. And it would be off the Internet.
Would the gang bangers change their ways? Not much. They’re not going to register illegally purchased weapons anyway, but they’ll be a lot less likely to spray “to whom it may concern” rounds across a street, killing Granny in her parlor. And they’ll give each other up for rewards on ammo hoarding. Ask the cops about that one.
Would a “black market” emerge? It always does, but now you’re going to have to buy from criminals and you might think twice about it. You could go to jail. Lots of folks will think twice about that,
Will size matter? Not when it comes to magazines, which has been one of the weaker notions of gun control. 30 round magazines would be tough to fill.
Will ranges want to take part in this? You bet. It will become a lot more profitable business model when you are the only legitimate point of sale for restricted ammo.
Will it clear the courts? The NRA will fight it, but I think in the end lose. You can still hunt, protect your family, go to ranges to shoot and keep all your guns. That’s pretty American.
If ever there was a time to push such a plan, it is now. So let’s see if somebody in national politics will take up this cause. As in the line from the movie 1776, “Is anybody there? Does anybody care?”
The glass suddenly shattered outward in the big window of the General Post Office, known to the locals as the GPO. Armed men, many wearing the yellow armband of Irish Volunteers, others in various military uniforms, had used their rifle butts to announce their arrival. It was the first warlike sound made, the first of many, in what would become known throughout the world as the Easter Rising. Shortly thereafter, a uniformed man by the name of Padraig Pearse came out to read a Proclamation to the confused and somewhat rattled crowds of passersby. He announced the birth of a new nation, the Republic of Ireland, free of the tyranny of Great Britain and determined to chart its own course among the other nations of the world. Later that day, they would use captured wireless equipment in the GPO to send out what would become the very first radio broadcast the world had ever heard: their Proclamation in Morse Code. It was Monday, April 24, 1916. Easter Monday.
Great Britain, already immersed in the Great War, and with a large standing army, acted swiftly to put down the rebellion. It poured thousands of troops across the Irish Sea and into Dublin, supported by artillery which was trained on the buildings and streets of central Dublin. Their gunboats navigated part of the River Liffey and blew apart other fortified positions of the Irish rebels. By April 29th, Dublin mostly in ruins, it was over, and the rebels surrendered.
The Rising might well have ended there, except for the arrogance of the local British Commander, Gen. John Maxwell, who chose to hold trials and execute fifteen of the leaders, one by one, over a period of several weeks. Each volley of shots echoed louder and louder in the souls of the Irish people, and by mid-May, the Rising had matured into the full anger of the Irish Rebellion, with fighting raging across the soon-to-be nation. ——————– We were just about recovered from the flight from O’Hare to Dublin, having napped and showered. Our mother was in a hospital in Muncie, Indiana, scheduled for a routine gall bladder procedure earlier that day and, once we are all together in our room, my sisters urged me to call and see if we could talk to her. I had arranged to call my Muncie based sister-in-law and my brother, who I guessed were bedside around then, and my sister-in-law answered on the first ring. The tremble in her voice hinted my worst fears.
Our mother was gone. My wife saw the shock on my face as I absorbed the tearful words from the other side of the ocean. As I stammered what I heard to the others gathering in our room, the gaiety of a joyful family reunion spiraled down into a chaos of disbelief, bewilderment, a hundred questions. The next few days were a blur of last minute travel arrangements, tearful phone calls and a coming home to be all together. It was Monday, April 21st, 2003. Easter Monday. ——————- Those two Easter Mondays, separated by some 87 years, somehow mark both the close proximity and the great distances between Ireland and America. They stand out in my mind as signposts in the timeline of my life and the lives of my ancestors. One marked the reasons my Irish family emigrated to America and the other marks the passing of a person so significant in our family’s return to Ireland.
There are millions of American families who can trace their origins to Ireland. Between 1846 and 1950, more than 6 million emigrated. Among them were three of my four grandparents, and the parents of my remaining grandmother, Theresa Oates. It didn’t take them long to establish themselves, get the jobs, start families, buy homes, and build neighborhoods.
People don’t emigrate from countries where life is good. When there is money in your pocket, food on the table, and opportunities to better yourself, people stay put. Take any one of them away and they will head for the door. The tyranny of British rule, the inability of an Irishman to own land within his own country, the failure of crops, particularly the sustaining potato, and a general sense of futility drove millions to the ports of Queenstown (now Cobh), Dublin, Belfast, and Liverpool.
They didn’t so much move as they were pushed to their new destination and new hope 4,000 mile to the west, in the United States. Most of them never thought they would return and most didn’t. Their voyage was long and difficult. I can remember asking my Grandmother Wogan several times if she would ever go back to Ireland, even pointing to the planes flying over our home in Chicago. In her mind, those planes didn’t go to Ireland. —————
But where most Irish-American families look on Ireland as their distant origin or maybe just a nice place to visit, my family went in a different direction. In 1977, my sister Mary Ann and her husband Jim Heneghan made the decision to move their small family from a bungalow on New England Street in northwest Chicago back to Jim’s home in the Partry Mountains. His village was Tourmakedy in County Mayo, a dozen or so miles from Westport or Castlebar. They had several reasons for considering such a move, but chief among them was the health of Jim’s parents who were ageing and beginning to fail in health; most of his siblings were here in Chicago.
Most of my siblings were in some process of starting their own families, as was I, so I recall we took the news of the move with some surprise, thinking it temporary at best. I recall helping to load a large shipping box that was dropped by a crane truck in their back yard. We loaded the box with their furnishings and tied it all down for travel by ship. Then they packed their bags, scooped up their young son JJ and headed to the airport. At the last minute, Jim received news on his U.S. citizenship, which meant he would have to follow Mary Ann about a week later. So my sister took the step into this unknown new life with just herself and her son.
She had been to Ireland once before, following her high school graduation, when she vacationed there with her cousin, so the culture was not entirely new to her. What she found upon arrival in this fairly remote part of Ireland, was a badly neglected house and farm, and two people very much in need of assistance. She set about the business of turning things around. Tapping into her bottomless supply of humor and wit, she dubbed her new location “Shangri-La” from the movie about a magical, mythical kingdom.
And so she settled into her new life, adding three more children to her family, and was joined a year or so later by another sister, Terese. “Tassi” as named by our nickname-addicted mother, initially worked in a nearby shirt factory, and in time met Eddie, her future husband, and started her own family of six. Their two homes are about a mile apart from each other.
The Ireland of the late 1970’s would be very different from the Ireland today. When my brother Bill was killed in a car accident in 1979, we had to break the tragic news to my sisters at the local pub which had the only phone available. They knew that a call from America to the pub was bad news. Mary Ann, nicknamed “Minnie” by our mother, could not leave her young family and was herself expecting. Tassi, still single at that point, came home for the funeral. I remember at the time feeling that my sisters lived in a very distant land.
It was later that summer that we pooled our funds to buy our mother a plane ticket to stay a few months with her daughters. We didn’t know it then, but that trip would in great measure define the remaining 25 years of her life. Mom spent at least two to three months each year in Ireland, growing strong bonds with her children and grandchildren in both nations. She came to prefer the spring, the time of “lambing” when the baby lambs were born. She enjoyed the backbreaking work of pulling the sod from the bog, then critical for winter fuel. She brought with her bags and bags of delicacies not then available in Ireland, like Hershey’s Kisses and, most especially, Duncan Hines cake mixes. She was gregarious by nature, so she made friends all through the area in and around my sisters’ homes. She embraced her life in Ireland every bit as much as she embraced her life in Chicago.
And over the years, Chicago and County Mayo go closer and closer to each other. By the time my wife and I could manage to travel, Ireland was much closer and much more within financial reach. Consider that very first ticket we bought my mom in 1979. That $600 would have felt like $2,300 today, according to economic scales. And yet today you can fly there for roughly the same $600, some 40 years later.
———– Without that long ago Easter Rising in 1916, no one today would consider making Ireland their new home. The country that emerged from “The Rising” on Easter Monday was a long time coming, but by the 1960’s could claim its own destiny, its own economy, and the tides of emigration slowly began to recede. And from 1979 until 2002, our mother’s annual trek to Ireland prompted us to renew the family ties with our own travel and we did so more than eight or ten times until her passing on Easter Monday, 2003. The distance between Ireland and America shrank from several weeks at sea to 7 or 8 hours in the air. ————–
Last June, I stood in front of the General Post Office in Dublin with my wife, my children and their spouses, and our five grandsons. The GPO is now both a functioning post office as well as a museum to the cost of Ireland’s freedom. My mind was filled with thoughts, memories, and emotions.
I thought of those fifteen martyrs to their cause. I thought of my sister Minnie’s late father-in-law, James Heneghan, Sr., an Irish rebel who fought in County Mayo. I recalled my sister describing how she and the women of the village prepared his body for the funeral at his death years later. I thought how different that experience must have been for her, growing up in Chicago. I thought of my mother’s many visits that slowly closed the distance between the two countries. I thought of the sacrifices and hardship that went into forming an Ireland where Americans would return and make their lives and raise their families. Mostly, I felt a quiet pride and a sense of being blessed in being there with our little band of twelve.
My grandsons took their first “crossing” in stride, not at all impressed by the miracle of flight, but very much into the history of this new city. A few days later, when we reached my sisters’ farms, they dove out of the cars and ran headlong into the fields to see the lambs and bullocks up close. In that moment the distance between the two countries seemed to disappear altogether.
I guess I will always be a little haunted by Easter Mondays, but it’s a good thing to be a little haunted at times.
There is a classic Mel Brooks scene in the History of the World movie where Brooks plays Moses coming down from the mountain. He went to a lot of trouble to capture the “Charlton Heston” Moses look, right down to the lighting, the garb, the mountain backdrop, and the long flowing beard. And he is holding three tablets instead of two. As he appears to the Chosen People, he announces to all that “The Lord, the Lord Jehovah, has given onto you these Fifteen” (and, of course, drops one of the tablets which breaks into a hundred pieces, and with his classic timing says)…”these Ten Commandments!” Great stuff!
The original Ten Commandments covers a lot of ground for mere mortals like us, and they formed a good deal of what ultimately became our civil laws. In case you forgot them from Sunday school or religion class, here they are again:
I am the Lord thy God! Thou shalt have no other Gods but me!
Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain!
Thou shalt keep the Sabbath Day holy!
Thou shalt honor thy father and mother!
Thou shalt not kill!
Thou shalt not commit adultery!
Thou shalt not steal!
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor!
Do not let thyself lust after thy neighbor’s wife!
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, nor his farm, nor his cattle, nor anything that is his!
————-
With the first three, God made sure of his own interests: One God to a customer, no false images, don’t talk bad about Me, and give Me my one day a week. Old Jehovah must have been feeling a bit insecure that day.
He gave a nod to Mom and Dad with the fourth one, although He Himself never had parents. Guess he felt a little guilty about rousting Adam and Eve from paradise.
And the last six are don’ts: don’t murder anyone, don’t screw around, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t go lusting after your neighbor’s hot little wife, and don’t covet thy neighbor’s bigger home, farm, cows, BMW, or anything else he owns and you don’t.
But the Brooks movie got me thinking. What would those missing five commandments have been? The first ten already touch on all the biggies, the stuff you might go to jail for, cause a divorce, get you shot, or maybe promise you a one-way ticket to Gehenna after your death. Did he really cover all the ground?
So rather than leave you wondering, here are my choices for those missing Five Commandments, but I offer them for your consideration in three flavors: The Heavies, The Regulars and The Lights. After all, I’m no Jehovah, and besides, he covered all the really hard stuff with his first ten.
The Heavies:
If thou should become a leader, remember that the best leaders are servants to those they lead.
Thou shall try to find someone in this world to love more than yourself. You’ll like it.
Do some good for someone, or a lot of someones, if you can.
Tolerate.
Though shalt not hold a grudge forever.
The Regulars:
Thou shalt utter more sentences that end in question marks than in exclamation points.
Thou shalt remember that thou is in charge of just thy life, not mine.
Thou shalt simply own thy possessions, rather than the other way around.
Thou shalt be generous and then keepeth thy mouth shut about how generous thou art.
Thou shalt remember that having a lot of money is nice, but it’s not a virtue.
The Lights:
Thou shalt remember that thou cannot put an old head on young shoulders. (Compliments to Deacon Bob Ryan on this one.)
Thou shalt not suck the air out of the room at a party.
Thou shalt not be afraid to over-tip thy server.
Thou shalt not worry about those things thou can’t fix.
Thou shalt not lose faith in thy team, no matter how bad they sucketh this year.
—————
So here is my open invitation to all of you…………….what would thou like to add to any or all of these lists? Feel free to reply to Comments!
I sat in my lawn chair and listened to a free concert of Lerner and Loewe music performed by the Millennium Park Orchestra and Chorus. A beautiful summer night in one of the most luminous spots in one of the world’s great cities. This is about as “First World” as it gets with wine, gourmet foods, good friends and not even an entry fee to get in. Millennium Park is a triumph, a “must see” when you visit Chicago. It is an evolving blend of artwork, interactive sculpture, landscaping, and performing arts, all surrounded on three sides by the rich and varied architecture of the Chicago skyscrapers. It never gets old.
Framing the north end of the park, along Randolph Street, are four prominent office buildings: the Blue Cross Building, the white towering AON Building, the old original skyscraper Prudential Building, and behind it the newer cousin, known as Two Pru (2 Prudential Plaza). There are scores of other residential creations on and behind Randolph, as well, but these are the office buildings. And the Pritzker Pavilion, home to a summer series of concerts, sits at their feet. As night falls and their lights come up, you can’t help feeling very fortunate to be there, in such a riot of lights and colors, all soaring above you in your little musical island of privilege.
It was during their renditions of songs from Camelot, a story now linked as a memory, however faulty, to the Kennedy years, that my mind began to wander. For some reason, I thought of those famous lines from an obscure poet named Emma Lazurus:
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Those words of kindness are written at the base of the Statue of Liberty and taught to generations of American school kids as our nation’s spirit of welcome and offer of a new beginning to those seeking to leave behind a weary world. The golden torch she holds high is that “lamp beside the golden door” to democracy and freedom. Our Camelot.
And yet, those words express only a wish and, like most wishes, are not entirely true and really never have been. Historically for most immigrants, as soon as the stop at Ellis Island was behind you, and you were officially welcomed on the path to naturalized citizenship, you pretty quickly found that you were not all that welcomed by whomever happened to get here before you.
You were a threat. A threat to my job, my neighborhood, my set of beliefs. Maybe you didn’t speak my language, didn’t attend my church. Rich people don’t often emigrate, so you were poor and probably would end up draining the tax coffers in some way. You didn’t have many skills and you may have brought illnesses with you. You were not schooled. You looked different. You were Irish, or Italian, maybe Polish, or a Jew, and you were a threat.
So you took the abuse. You made neighborhoods in the cities and built the ghettos of your particular clan for the safety in numbers it offered, and you took the low work. You worked and married someone like you and started a family. You bought a two flat or a bungalow and you celebrated your culture in the taverns, the church halls, and with parades. And you worked. You and your children and their children earned your way in over several generations.
My wife’s paternal grandfather was such an immigrant. Thomas Hawkins came from Ireland around the turn of the 20th century, passed by the “Irish Need Not Apply” signs all along the Eastern seaboard and made his way inland to Chicago; the CTA hired him to work at a bus barn near North Avenue and Cicero in some entry level job. At the end of his first shift, he asked the foreman if he should come back tomorrow. The foreman, a bit puzzled, said yes. Again the next day and the day after that, he repeated his question at day‘s end until the foreman, now exasperated, told him “Look, man, you have a job. Show up here every day but Sunday.” It had never occurred to young Thomas that there was anything but day work, work as he knew it from the old country. A steady hourly wage, a defined work week, and benefits were entirely new to Thomas and millions like him.
But only a dozen years later, this same immigrant would feel himself American to the core, as did his fellow Irish Americans. His son, Marty Hawkins, my wife’s father, told the story of being a little boy sitting on the front porch steps while his dad and friends had a beer and discussed politics. It was Irish brogues all around. One of them remarked, in a thick brogue that “The trouble with this country was that we’re letting too many foreigners in!” Young Martin looked up from face to face, knowing that every one of them was from Ireland. I asked him what he said or did and he told me, “I didn’t say anything.” A wise young man.
——————
Building lights work differently at night for office buildings than they do for residential buildings. Condos, apartments, and hotels have many more dark windows than lighted ones, what with people travelling, un-booked hotel rooms, being part time or weekend getaway places. It is unusual to see a horizontal string of illuminated windows in such a building running more than four or five windows in a row.
Office buildings, at night, tell a different story. Most offices are open architecture these days, so you will see whole floors of lights flick on or off. And as I sat there for several hours at my concert, it occurred to me that the different floors of lights going on or off reflected the movement and progress of the cleaning personnel who were cleaning those offices. If you wondered who make up those cleaning crews, you need only get on board a southbound Metra in the morning, a train taking you out of the city, not in. Onboard you will find the cleaning crews, some white, and some black, but overwhelmingly Mexican and Central American women, tired at the end of their long night shift and on their way home.
—————-
It seems far from Camelot now, under the brutal and profane thumb of a president who is trying hard to sell his dystopian vision of a white, privileged, isolated USA, where immigrants pose not just a threat to our economy, but also bring crime with them. He is selling fear and specifically fear of immigrants from Mexico and Central America. He has blurred immigrants into those seeking sanctuary from violence. He has separated mothers and fathers from their children. He has abandoned and betrayed our role as world leader.
Sadly, there are many who have bought into his vision of a “walled off” America and to that crowd he has become a sort of Messiah. Equally as sad, he is using his vast presidential powers to enable and empower mean-spirited trolls at the national level who are as devoid of character and compassion as he appears to be. Most of them seem to have lifeless eyes, as if their soul has been removed. They are working hard to dim the lamp of welcome atop that statue in New York Harbor, to have it go dark altogether if they can have their way.
But as I watched those office windows light up, it struck me that this is why the haters will lose: the immigrants will simply outwork them. Just as immigrants before them, like the Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews and others, they will take every lousy job that comes along, make minimum wage, go without healthcare and dental plans, and keep working. They won’t take vacations, they will drive old cars and fix them in their driveways on Sunday. They will work two jobs, take on odd jobs if they can. They will pool their family wages in a weekly effort to survive in America. And they will keep working.
You can see them cutting the grass on your local golf course, wiping down your car at the car wash, running the kitchens of the local eatery, landscaping your house, cleaning your hotel room, scavenging the alleys for old metal, picking the crops, and cleaning the offices at night. And they will keep working. They may clean the offices now, but they know that education is key, and their children will work civil service jobs and entry level management positions and work in those same offices their parents once cleaned and their grandchildren will become the leaders and professionals and they will carry their work ethic into generation after generation. And that’s why they will win, winning for the United States in the bargain.
So as long as those office lights keep shining in the night to mark the progress of the immigrant workers, their glow will have to replace the dimmed lamp of freedom from the Statue of Liberty. And someday soon, when this madness is swept away by the millions of Americans who really understand the value of liberty and the meaning of democracy, perhaps the golden torch will regain its luster and we will once again welcome the world’s immigrants to our new and better Camelot.
When I posted a recent article called “Catholic Born,” I got a few responses from readers. Some indicated they felt much the same way as I did, and I suspect those who remained silent disagreed either a little or maybe a lot with what I wrote, but that’s OK. It was one comment made by my daughter Julie that kind of hit home. She told me “Thanks for not being a priest, dad. Even with all its flaws, and there are many, I find comfort in the rituals.”
While there was little danger of me ever becoming a priest, it made me realize that as I laid out my thoughts on the many teachings of the Catholic Church that I have discarded, as well as the dissatisfaction I feel over current church rules, I missed something important. Being raised Catholic is as much the culture you live in as it is any set of personal beliefs. Leaving that culture behind you is as rare and as difficult as a lifelong White Sox fan waking up one morning and buying season’s tickets for Wrigley Field.
A bit about that culture……………….
The stories:
I was twelve years old and standing in line in front of my dad at the door to the confessional in Resurrection Church on the west side. It was Holy Saturday and all four confessionals were doing a land office business, confession back then being a weekly requirement before taking communion the next day. Lines were long to the left and right of each set of boxes and the little lights above the doorways to forgiveness flashed from red to green as sinners concluded their litany, got their penance, and rose from the kneelers inside their compartments. It reminded me of old war movies where the paratroopers had their eyes glued on the light near the door of the C-47, waiting to jump into combat when the light turned green.
Each confessional consisted of three doors, the center door being reserved for the priest, and the two outboard doors for the sinners. The name of the priest inside was on a nameplate over his door, and people had their favorites, much like shopping for a more lenient judge in court. You wanted absolution, but you wanted it with the least amount of guilt and pain.
The priest sat in a chair and pulled open a screen on his side which allowed you, the sinner, to hear his voice and sort of see his shadow. Before he opened your screen, he could be heard mumbling back and forth with the sinner on the other side of the box. You always tried to listen in and catch the other guy’s treacherous failings, or maybe pick up a new, harmless sin you could use next week, but you could never quite make it out. Once your screen opened, it was Showtime and you went into your lines: “Bless me father, for I have sinned. It has been (your answer here) since my last confession.”
I was next up in that line and my father, not the most patient of men, began to fidget; whoever the person was in that box ahead of me was in there for a long time. Each time another light flashed and a door opened in one of the other confessionals, he sighed, looked at his watch, shook his head, looked around. I could sense it building. It was clear that the priest and the sinner were having a long talk, because the poor guy in the box on the opposite side was stuck in there, awaiting his turn. The sinners behind us, eager to get forgiveness and then hit the grocery store, began deserting for shorter lines or faster moving lines. But we were next and so we were stuck.
Finally, his fuse finished burning and he blew. In a voice everyone in the church could hear, he said “Well I guess they got the guy who shot Lincoln!” Those working off their penances, kneeling in the pews, were startled. Some of the older ladies threw him looks of disapproval. Some of the men could be seen shaking with laughter but trying not to show it. Kids had their mouths open in surprise. And me? I wanted to die, but that’s because I was twelve. And the endless conference inside that confessional ended a few seconds later, so perhaps the priest or the sinner took the loud hint from outside.
——————-
Mass always began with the priest standing between two kneeling altar boys, all with our backs to the faithful. The priest spoke first: “Introibo ad altare Dei” (I will go up onto the altar of my God).
We as the altar boys responded in unison: “Ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meam” (The God who gives joy to my youth).
It was Latin, but it might as well have been Swahili or Kurdish. We didn’t understand a single word of it. To become an altar boy, you had to memorize all of the Latin words of the mass on a small four page card and know when to say the words. No English translation was supplied and none was considered necessary.
I’m not sure how much joy to my youth was brought about by serving 6 a.m. mass on a February morning, but I had more than my share of those mornings. Mass came in several flavors for altar boys: early weekday masses (attended by about the same fifteen people every day), Sunday mass, both high mass (longer and with more singing) and low mass (mercifully shorter), funerals (four altar boys required) and weddings (only two required).
My best day as an altar boy was a big Italian wedding, where the best man handed each of us an envelope with $15 inside. The priest asked if we had been paid anything so that it could go to the “Altar Boy Fund” and I and my partner Bill lied through our teeth. Fifteen dollars in 1962 felt like winning the lotto. No one could have more money than that all at one time, and I was, at least for a time, quite wealthy. Anyway, I’d cover the lie vaguely at confession the following week and certainly not to the same priest.
Second best were all of those days when you were called upon for funeral duty. Catholic funerals were always on weekdays, so you got out of class for the hour of the service, and another 45 minutes of goof-off time, which you could easily alibi to the nuns as a service that ran long.
—————-
The Gospels
You remember Martha and Mary, those two sisters of Lazarus who entertained Jesus during a stopover in Bethany? Martha was all about working the event, but Mary just sat at His feet listening to him. When Martha went to file a beef with Jesus about her lazy sister, she got a rebuke from the Man himself. She was too concerned with earthly things, He said. I wonder if He might have been a bit less critical after not getting fed and watered, had Martha not been running the show and looking after her guests.
Every woman in every family knows who the Marthas are and who the Marys are. Marthas plan the parties, clean the house, shop for the goodies, get the meal out, look after their guests and clean up after. Marys sit, drink wine, and chat. Every family is a mix of the two and each side knows it, seems to accept that you’re one or the other by nature and not likely to change. Marthas at a party bond together in their righteousness and volunteer to help each other out. They can be found in the kitchen. Marys won’t leave their chairs unless the wine runs out. They can be found on the patio or in the living room.
You know which one you are, ladies.
————-
You know the story of the prodigal son. Kid asks for an early inheritance, leaves town, blows it all on hookers and booze, then comes home broke and penitent. Good old dad rejoices in his return. Older brother, Steady Eddie, is a bit pissed.
For years, I identified with the older brother, thought that dad telling him “but you are with me always” sounded a lot like “and you’re chopped liver.” Your brother is a jerk, but gets forgiven by dad and even celebrated like he did something right for once in his life. Which he didn’t. Meanwhile, you toed the line, worked the farm, and did everything you were supposed to and nobody is putting fine robes on your back or slaughtering any fatted calves in your honor. Raw deal all around.
This was my take on this gospel story for years, until someone shared their interpretation with me. This person, an experienced dad like myself, said he shared my take for years. But looking back on it all, he now concludes that the true meaning of the story was that raising kids was a pain in the butt. Who am I to argue?
———–
The Homilies
I don’t know how many homilies I’ve heard, but just doing the math it has to be more than three thousand. And only three still stay with me.
The two frogs….
The first was given by Father Flannery, a priest at Resurrection who was also a decorated Marine Corp chaplain and who was wounded at Iwo Jima. I was in first grade and I remember his homily about the two frogs who jumped into a pail full of milk. Both were struggling to keep from drowning. One gave up and did indeed drown, but the other frog had some sort of amphibious faith and kept swimming and kicking and, lo and behold, churned the milk into butter. The butter gave him a solid surface from which to jump free of the pail. Keep kicking was the message I guess.
My brother and the apostles…
Father Joe Mulcrone, a Resurrection guy, said the funeral homily when my brother Bill was killed in a car accident in 1979. We were shattered at the time, numb from disbelief, and in need of some comforting words. Fr. Joe’s homily compared Bill with the apostles. He pointed out that the apostles, like Bill, were no saints when Jesus found them. He concluded that Bill would have been comfortable in their company. His words began the long healing process for all of us and I am grateful to him to this day.
The guys travelling to the next town….
Father Bill Gubbins was a gifted homilist in Queen of Martyrs parish. He told the tale of the traveler who upon arriving at a town gate, asked an old man sitting nearby about the people in the town. “What kind of people live here?” he asked. The old man replied, “How were the people in the last town you were in?” replied the old man. “Awful, terrible people,” the traveler answered. “Well,” said the old man, “I’m afraid you’ll find these people much the same.”
Later on, another traveler came to the same town, and again asked the same old man near the gate the same question. “What kind of people live here?” he asked. The old man again replied, “How were the people in the last town you were in?” “Kind, wonderful people,” the traveler answered. “Well,” said the old man, “I think you’ll find these people much the same.”
Yesterday in America we celebrated Valentine’s Day and Catholics around the world also marked the beginning of Lent with Ash Wednesday. We also watched the unfolding nightmare in Florida with 17 dead, brought about by a deeply disturbed young man and his rifle. Like in most mass shootings, the shooter did not break a single law until he chambered his first round and fired it into his first victim.
You know the list better than anyone. Some 26 church-going people in Texas gunned down by a madman using a weapon that used .223 caliber military style ammunition. Another madman in Las Vegas used the same ammunition, plus 7.62 millimeter and a few other types to kill 58 and injure more than 500. Before that it was the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando and 49 dead (9 millimeter and 7.62 millimeter), Virginia Tech with 32 dead, (.223 and .22 calibers) and Sandy Hook Elementary with 27 dead, 20 of them children (223 caliber). The list is endless, including Columbine’s 13 dead (9 millimeter), Aurora, Colorado, 12 dead (.40 caliber and .223 caliber) and on and on. In most cases, very large quantities of legally purchased ammunition were part of the story.
You, Mr. Lapierre, can help fix this. Your organization is, in fact, the law when it comes to gun ownership. Your organization is all powerful, you control the politicians at any level of government. You are exceptionally well funded and can make or break politicians who oppose your 2nd Amendment position. I’m not naive enough to think that a Republican held House, Senate and White House are going to oppose you on gun ownership. We just wait two weeks until the funerals are over and the news cycle rotates and then we can brace for the next one, and the next one, and the one after that.
But your organization, Mr. Lapierre, was founded on the issue of firearms safety. Why not return to those worthy roots and get behind this simple idea:
Start treating the most deadly ammunition the same way we treat powerful drugs that require a doctor’s prescription. Recognize that certain type of ammunition need to be controlled, because they are overwhelmingly used in homicides and mass shootings. Get them off the retail market, both in stores and online. They include:
9 MM
7.62 MM
.223 CAL
.380 CAL
.45 CAL ACP
.22 CAL
This means that within a defined period of time (90-180 days?), these ammunitions come off the retail shelves and the Internet and enter a federally controlled distribution system. This also means that all other types of ammunition are unaffected by this law. You can buy all the shotgun shells, 30.06 rounds, etc. you want (subject to local regulations) for hunting, sporting clays, whatever. These rounds aren’t the problem; they mostly kill deer, birds, varmints, and clay pigeons.
The NRA, and probably only the NRA, could make this happen. And in doing so, you could provide the nation with a solution that its citizens desperately want, but whose politicians are mortally afraid to move on. But not if you were behind it.
There are some practical aspects to the plan, so that we keep the range shooters happy, ammo manufacturers can still sell their product, etc. I wrote up some of the practical steps in an article on a blog site. You can read it at http://uncletommyonline.com/?p=377, if you care to. It says some unflattering things about the NRA, but we’re all big boys, so I think we can get past it.
In a single bold stroke, the NRA could alter its’ image within this country and the world from a polarizing stance of “gun ownership freedom at all costs” to the “champions of public safety.” Your membership would grow considerably, once the polarization was off the table and you were behind saving innocent lives. Hell, I‘d even join.
And you can keep your 2nd Amendment position intact. The Constitution doesn’t say anything about bullets, only the muzzles they come out of. It’s an opportunity for the NRA, Mr. Lapierre. I’m guessing you must be as tired of counting bodies as the rest of us.
You know that part of the scripture they read at Christmas where they recite the lineage from Abraham to Isaac, to Jacob, and then about thirty five others who were all “begot’ until they finally get down to Joseph, the father of Jesus? I once asked a priest that if Jesus was really the result of the ”Virgin Birth,” as I was taught, then aren’t all of those guys on that lengthy list just his step-father’s dead relatives? For some reason, he seemed annoyed with me.
Either through fate, family history, or some combination of parental decisions, personal calls, happenstance, or whatever other forces out there control one’s destiny, I am and always have been pretty Catholic.
Consider the facts. I was baptized Catholic, owe every academic credential I have to Catholics schools, once thought I would be a priest, have worked for priests, brothers and nuns for a collective total of about eleven years (and counting) of my varied career, was active in parish leadership, raised my kids Catholic and, as far as I know, am in good standing with the church. And I married a Catholic girl even more Catholic than me. Who else do you know can recite from memory the list of priestly vestments (chasuble, alb, cincture, and some other stuff), the seven deadly sins (gluttony, sloth, and more bad things you shouldn’t do) and the Memorare? I won’t even go into her devotion to Mary, which is some sort of happy feminist spiritual preference, as if Mary is the only saint who can be really trusted, most of the rest being men.
That old Catholic church that defined much of my youth seems like a distant memory now. I remember it as a Church of ironclad and seemingly timeless rules, the endless list of things we did and said that seem so silly now. Taking communion on your tongue without biting into the host, never touching a chalice (some boy did, we were told, and he died), fasting, wearing scapulars like G.I. dogtags, writing AMDG or JMJ on top of each page of schoolwork, rosaries, novenas, masses with school attendance taken, mortal and venial sins, purgatory, hell, telling your oft-repeated three or four pre-adolescent sins to some guy in a box each week.
Today, I’m not an angry Catholic, just a mystified and somewhat dissatisfied one. Along the way I jettisoned most of the doctrinal baggage so carefully installed by a host of nuns and priests in my formative years. It’s not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing, and it’s not a loss of faith. It’s just that over time I grew to consider it just so much extra unimportant detail to the core of the message.
The list of lost luggage is lengthy and includes the aforementioned virgin birth, the immaculate conception, transubstantiation, the need for male celibate priests, the assumption of anyone’s actual body into heaven, Jesus as something other than an extraordinary man, little cherub angels, purgatory, plenary indulgences that mirrored our federal prison parole guidelines, demons, wood from the True Cross, and the many heads of John the Baptist scattered throughout Europe. And I might do a run-on sentence like this last one, but I don’t do confession.
Some things have added to my cynicism. On my first visit to Rome, I visited the Vatican Museum, a garish monument to the Catholic Church’s rich history of basically ripping off anything of value from Europe or Africa and the Middle East that wasn’t nailed down. After about 200 statues, I had seen enough. I have visited the Knock shrine in Ireland, held so dear by its locals, but which, like Fatima and Lourdes, has evolved into a bit of a religious side show. I have seen the 35 foot-tall silver aluminum statue of Mary as it made its rounds to churches in Chicago, rising like a sort of devotional ICBM from a flatbed truck, the personal penance of some poor guy who once owned liquor stores, or so I heard. It hasn’t exactly deepened my faith.
I have tried to center my faith on the essential meaning of Jesus, a man who came along at a moment in history and told us to love each other, forgive each other, to stop stealing from each other, conquering each other, and butchering each other. Simple enough instructions that we still haven’t mastered, but I can admire and try to follow the playbook well enough.
He came at a time when the world was maybe for the first time ready to start listening, and his message grew from that point onward as a force for good, through apostles, martyrs, and simple people in search of answers. He didn’t need to be anything other than an exceptionally good man of God to start the world in a new direction, and, as so often happens, they killed him for it. His story and his meaning doesn’t require that he be born without human intercourse, that he be some sort of “man-god” or even that he rise from the dead. I realize that the Church, if they really thought me important enough (they don’t) to single me out for these beliefs, could deny me last rites and burial in a Catholic cemetery, but I have my cremation “get out of jail free” card, so I’ll take my chances. Just scatter my ashes on the 6th hole at Ridge Country Club.
So I still go to Mass most Sundays, perhaps missing during a week when we attend a funeral or if the weekend is too crowded. I go there usually pleasantly, grateful for the quiet comfort of being part of a large group of people whom I assume are of similar thought and belief as me. I go hoping to hear a good homily, but those are as rare these days as political elections that I feel good about. I go to enjoy the music, especially a good choir. I go to spend an hour with my wife at my side where we just “are”. Sometimes I just go out of a sense of obligation. Sometimes I go when I really do feel the need to pray for something.
But lately I feel like I am a tenant in a building where many people are moving out and no one is moving in. The Catholic Church is in a downward spiral, or maybe a downward spiral with a turn to the right. Fewer churches, fewer active members, some moving to evangelical churches that mange to better answer their needs. As I write this, some 26 Chicago parishes need pastors and only 19 are available.
And of those 19, how many would you feel good about? I lost count of the number of stories I have heard about some Catholic priest denying marriage, requiem mass, or baptism in their church based on attendance at mass or donation records. I recently sat through an embarrassing 30-minute harang by a pastor to an absolutely packed church regarding his personal expectations of the churchgoers in terms of promptness, singing, and leaving early. Bite me, father. An archbishop who I actually went to school with will not bury gay Catholics in his diocese, even though death kind of settles your sexuality issues. It’s not just quantity, but quality.
Orders of nuns, priests, and brothers are in their sunset years now, with pathetically few younger members. The model that once attracted so many young new leaders, myself included, is broken. And the endless file of the sexually abused and the indefensible cover-ups by the hierarchy have all but snuffed out the flames of devotion in even the most Catholic of Catholics. But the voice of “super Catholics” seems to be on the rise, those homophobic, pro-life, pro-death penalty (I’ll never get that) adherents to Doctrine as defined in Rome. A bleak future, if we change nothing.
Much of this downward spiral, and this is most mystifying of all, is driven by the insistence of a male celibate priest model. We are watching parishes around the country being rolled into other parishes, and not really for lack of enough faithful, as for lack of leadership. The hierarchy tries to fill in the holes with young priests from the third world or Eastern Europe. They might as well try extra-terrestrials, as I have witnessed homilies so out of touch with our reality as to generate good stories at parties. Some zealous kid from Manilla or Krakow, however well meaning, is not the answer. Nor are lay deacons, who do a good job, but who are too few in number.
The solutions are obvious and, I think, probably acceptable to most Catholics not on the extreme right: drop the requirement for celibacy for men and allow women to be ordained. Do those two things, or even one or the other, and your shortage of ministers problem goes away in a few years. Fact is, being a priest is not a bad job and people who are sensitive and compassionate and who want to make a difference will find it a natural calling. I happen to work in a place with some amazing nuns who would be terrific pastors, and a damned sight better at preaching than the last five guys I endured. When it comes to ministry, it’s like we have one hand tied behind our collective backs and our “top down” authority structure shows no sign of movement. Therein lies the dissatisfaction.
I remarked to one of the sisters recently that I often wondered “Why am I still Catholic?”
She shrugged, smiled, and said, “Where else would we go?”
A gear in a train of gears, mounted on a pivot arm so that it can be swung into and out of engagement with an adjacent gear.
————
Tumbler gears are remarkable inventions, even though usually being hidden on the inside of things, they are seldom seen. Picture the inside workings of a bank safe, with tumbler gears so precisely in tune that only when five or six are perfectly aligned, can the door can be opened. Or the tumbler gears inside of an automobile transmission, moving at intensely high speeds and interacting so smoothly with other gears that the driver scarcely notices a gear change. Open up an older wristwatch and you will see a miniature wonderland of gears, all working to keep the minute and hour hands correctly aligned. Most mechanical tumblers gears are made of metal or plastic, and you can hold them in your hand; but there are other types of intangible tumblers at work in this world. And they live deeply in our consciousness, and are also seldom seen.
A few weeks ago I heard the faint click of the tumbler gears in my mind aligning… someone’s actual event started a gear in motion that engaged another mental tumbler gear, this one in my memory. It wasn’t a very loud click, or even a critical life changing event, but it clicked, nonetheless.
We are entirely flesh and blood physical beings and there are no gears in us a doctor could expose in an operating room; but in our consciousness, our senses, and our memories, an interlocking series of gears is working always. You may start out as infant with only one or two gears…. maybe one for hunger and one for comfort, but the gears get added quickly. Before long you get gears added for most of your needs: affection, recognition, security, ego, gratification, possession. Still later come the gears for social interaction: personal appearance, sexual attraction, standing within your crowd, and personal achievement. And your gears can engage other peoples’ gears. Meet someone and fall in love and some of both of your gears engage. Start a family and pass along some of your gears and a bunch of much older gears ranging back countless generations, soon to be installed in your offspring. Lose someone close to you and your gears go out of sync for awhile, slowly returning to normal as time works its magic on your grief.
Every decision you make and every happenstance that falls your way speeds up or slows down your gears, changing your viewpoint, your convictions, and shaping the person you have become and are still becoming. And all of these gears are turning, and at times aligning with another gear, and when that happens, the two tumbler gears mesh with a soft click. Something resonates within you.
———–
My oldest grandson recently sat for his high school entrance examination at St. Rita High School. It was the same building where some fifty four years earlier I also sat for an entrance exam, only then the school was brand new and known as Quigley South. I’d like to think he sat at the same desk as I did, but fifty four years is a long time for a school desk, so I’ll chalk that one up to whimsy. I remember my exam day vividly, a cold January Saturday morning, for which I didn’t even mind having to be in a school. All my gears for excitement, nervousness, and adventure were engaged at once. I was moving on to something new and I’m guessing it was the much the same for Matthew.
I remember the priest in a long black cassock who proctored the exam. I remember thinking the exam was easy. I remember seeing the swimming pool and the enormous gym. I remember that they fed us hamburgers and fries after we were done. And the gears from his real life exam day and those from my remembered exam day briefly aligned and it resonated.
He is about to transition, and in so many ways. He will shortly leave elementary school, a world defined mostly by women. A transition from a world characterized by order, adherence to rules, kindness, compassion, and a feminine sense of fairness. He will soon enter a high school world of boys and men. It will be less orderly, less kind, less compassionate, and in many ways more demanding. It will certainly be a bit smellier. And he can’t wait to get there. Like me back then, like most of us, he is impatient to grow all the way up.
He is embarking on a four-year journey that will define the young man Matthew who waits for us in our shared futures. It is a time of rapidly turning gears, fueled by desire for acceptance, hopes for the future, an overpowering need for independence, and hormones firing away. To be sure it will be a confusing time, a time of higher highs and lower lows, a time of passionate feelings, fierce anger, and sweet joys.
Here’s the best part: he gets to select the man he wishes to be. He will define himself in so many ways…. as a student, an athlete, a friend, a loner or part of a group, maybe a boyfriend to a girl we haven’t yet met. He will start to think of what he wants to do in life. He will learn to drive a car. He will think about college. And he won’t be alone in his questions or discoveries. He will have plenty of company from his classmates who will be struggling for life’s answers just as he will.
He will have strong guidance and have to answer to discipline, probably more than he wants. The guidance will come from his teachers, older boys, coaches, the occasional adult who gets through the fog of adolescence with the right question or observation that hits home for him. It will be amazing and maybe a little frustrating to watch this occur, just as I am sure it was for my parents. He will leave his boyhood behind him and grow into a young man and it will happen not fast enough for him and too fast for us.
The beauty of being a grandparent is that you don’t worry like you did as a parent, if for no other reason than you have come to realize how little control of someone else’s life you ever really had in the first place. You can create the home environment, lay down the rules, educate, encourage, cajole, sometimes punish, but there are a lot of gears turning, far too many for you to control.
So I am excited and happy for Matthew, as I will be for his brother and his cousins when they reach that junction in life’s road. His parents laid down a solid foundation under him and he knows he’s loved, that he is expected to do well, and that this is an important step, but one he anticipates with eagerness.
A young Ray Kroc, played by Michael Keaton in the movie The Founder, is striking out time after time as he tries to sell his milkshake machines to fast food owners in the 1950’s. He has a snappy pitch and he has a good product and no one is buying. Time after time he lugs his product back to the trunk of his car, growing more and more dejected.
And immediately I understood the reason for his failures, but I suspect most people did not. He was peddling, not selling, and there is a huge difference between the two.
—————-
His business garb was not slick, but rather a study in disorder. Suitcoat rumpled and not sized to his medium bear-sized frame, slacks wrinkled, tie askew. He smoked cigars and seemed to have one sticking from the side of his mouth more often than not. Long before the onset of modern no smoking laws, his office lay under a cloud of cigar smoke. Most of the rest of us smoked cigarettes at our desks, so it was nowhere near the notable offense it would be today.
His name was Don Bickel, and he made me learn the gift that I carry along with me to this day, a gift most people have difficulty recognizing or appreciating. The gift that I brought to many different positions and which sustained me through some twenty-five years of owning a business. He taught me how to sell.
In June of 1973 I was finishing up my second year of teaching English at Mother Guerin High School. I was paid the princely sum of $6,800 per year, with no health insurance, and had more side jobs going than a crazed gypsy. I was driving a cab, teaching auto mechanics in a junior college, getting my commission in the National Guard, among other gigs. I enjoyed teaching, but with a new baby, it was time to change careers. I answered an ad for a sales position with a new offspring product of the Chicago Tribune called the Little Tribune, which later became the Suburban Trib.
I earned an initial interview with Don and a few others, but they were suspicious that I was looking to take the job just for the summer and then return to teaching. They asked me to come back in a week and make a sales presentation to them. Any topic, any idea, just come in and do it. At the time, a few National Guard OCS buddies and I were fooling around with the idea of starting a garage where you could work on your own car using the garage’s tools. You would rent space, buy your parts from us, and have access to things like air compressors, high lifts, power tools, et al. This was 1973, when cars could still be tuned up, and three years before the automotive industry went from mechanical to digital, and the term “tune-up” passed into history.
So I made up my poster boards, typed up my business concept, and went into the room to make my pitch about the “Do-it-Yourself” garage idea to Mr. Bickel and three others. I was nervous, but hyped, and after about 15 minutes, they stopped me. But they were all smiling. “You’re hired, Mr. Wogan,” Don told me. I think they were sold when they saw the work I had put into the pitch and the level of my excitement. They just wanted to see how badly I wanted the job.
So I was now making an incredible amount of money: $14,000 per year and, wait for it, a new company car, an Olds Cutlass, no less. I had arrived. No one could possibly make more money than $14,000.
On my first day, I met the five people who had been hired with me, all about the same age, none of us with any real newspaper ad sales experience. And so school began. Two weeks of learning about all things advertising: agate lines to the inch, gutters, center spreads, page positioning, half tones, premium placement, camera ready art, deadlines, double trucks, tab vs. broadsheet, screening, and more. And the financial language of display advertising: frequency discounts, co-opt deals, commisionable rates for ad agencies, color charges, column inch rates, automotive rates, and contract commitments. We were young and mentally absorbent and a few days later it was second nature to us all.
Now came the real schooling. We were each assigned a suburb for the soon to be published “Area 5” of the Little Trib. These were the northern suburbs, dominated for years by the powerful Paddock publications, and someone in Tribune Tower wanted a piece of their long undisputed revenues. So we were selling a paper no one had yet seen, for rates about the same as our competitors, to customers much older, more cynical, and far wiser than us. You needed your share of Chutzpah, that Yiddish word for shameless audacity, impudence, cheek, guts, nerve, boldness, and temerity.
Don would pick a salesmen each day and ride with him. On my first day with him, he didn’t say much as I made the rounds from retail stores to banks to car dealerships. Most owners would give you a few minutes to explain what it was you were selling, then accept the materials you had brought along, but not offer much in the way of encouragement. Don hovered in the background, but the customers knew I was being trained. Old Jim Jennings of Jennings Chevrolet was the scariest. He chewed up salesmen for breakfast and you really needed to grow a backbone just to put up with his tirades and insults.
It was over a sandwich on my second ride that Don decided to begin my personal education. “You talk too much,” he said and then stopped and took a bite of his sandwich. I was stopped in my tracks, not knowing where this was going. I asked him what he meant and he explained a few fundamentals to me.
“Rule 1 is that you come to your prospect prepared. You need to have questions to ask.”
“Rule 2 is that you wait for the opportunity to ask one of your questions.”
“Rule 3 is that once you ask it, you don’t talk, you listen.”
He went on at great length to explain the simple truth of selling: ask your customer what is important to him, ask why it’s important, and then listen. Your customer will tell you how to sell him. He asked me about the call to Chips Casual’s, an upscale men’s shop in downtown Glenview we had just come from. “Describe what you did,” he said.
“I introduced myself and told him where I was from and what the paper was about,” I said. “What should I have done?”
He went on. “Here’s what he heard: You know nothing about my business, you probably don’t care to learn about my business and you just want me to buy ads.” I was confused. “I don’t think I was rude,” I said somewhat defensively.
“You weren’t rude. You were just not selling. Want to know what selling sounds like?” I nodded yes.
“Good morning, Mr. Stevenson (which you got from his business license in the window, by the way), I’m Tom Wogan from the Suburban Trib. I was admiring your store.”
“Is this the original location? Let him talk.”
“How long have you been in business? Let him talk.”
“Most of your customer’s local to Glenview? Let him talk. “
“What does a typical Chips Casual customer look like? Let him talk.”
“At some point, he will get tired of talking and then it’s your turn to talk. But now you know what to talk about. If he’s telling you most of his business is local, you can point to our local circulation, which now makes sense to him. If it’s mostly men buying for themselves or women buying for their men, you can point to our readership demographics, which now means something to him. In other words, you’re not selling advertising, you’re selling increased profit. That’s goal number one.”
“Are there other rules?” I inquired.
“Just two more. First, you’re building relationships.” I asked how you did that.
Did you see that Navy League plaque behind his counter?” I had. “Next visit you inquire about his service in the Navy. Again, let him talk. He’s proud of his service and wants to share it. ”
“You said there were two more, that’s only one.”
“Ask for the order,” he said. I must have looked confused.
“Most sales people leave a lot of potential business on the table because they never ask for the order. You need to find the courage to say, in so many words, “Can I have your business?”
————
There were many more lessons to come over the next year and as time went on, I stopped dreading the “ride along” days with Don and began to look forward to learning more and more of his tradecraft. Under his eye and ear, I learned to seek out hints and clues as to what was important to my customers. I learned to ask questions. I learned to listen. I learned to ask for the order by using a “trial close”, which goes something like this:
“Well, Mr. or Ms. Prospect, you’ve told me that price is important to you, that flexibility is important to you and that ability to make last minute changes is important to you, does that sound about right?
Well if I gave you an ad schedule that was 10% less costly, that allowed you to change your ads up to 12 hour prior to publication, is there any reason you wouldn’t give my paper a try for eight weeks?”
More than anything, I learned that building relationships is a two-way street. You had to be bringing something of “value added” service to your customer in order to be distinguishable from your competitors. In that line of work, it might be an unsolicited ad idea done up by our staff artists, or an idea for a promotion you saw work elsewhere. If showed you cared about more than just his billing.
And to this day, I rank anyone in a leadership position by how many questions they ask of their subordinates and customers, and how well or poorly they listen.
I will always be grateful that I was given the gift of a mentor at a young age. God bless you, Don, wherever you are.
How many doors do we pass through in life? A thousand? Ten thousand, maybe a million? Most often, it’s a familiar door, where there are no surprises awaiting you on the other side. Your front door, your bedroom door, your office door. Sometimes, though, the unknown or even the dreaded awaits on the other side of that door. A job interview, for example, or a doctor’s visit to hear a diagnosis, or calling on someone to whom you are about to break some very bad news. And sometimes it’s just an unassuming door, one you don’t give any thought to as you pass through it; but it is, in fact, the door that moves your life in some totally new and unexpected direction.
————-
It was August, 1967, and my 18th birthday was looming, less than a month away. Back then, all 18 year old males were required by law to register with the Selective Service System, more commonly referred to as The Draft. So on a hot summer morning, I jumped on the Madison streetcar and took a ten minute ride to the corner of Pulaski and Madison, which was still called Crawford and Madison by my father and most people his age. They didn’t like the city renaming their street for a Polish guy, I guess. Three or four doors north was 43 N. Pulaski and one flight up an old staircase was the regional office for the Selective Service System. I opened the glass door and entered.
The office wasn’t much, maybe 14 feet square, fans blowing, no air conditioning. Six chairs against the wall, three of them occupied by my peers. A table with some pencils and a stack of single page questionnaires. At the far end of this little office sat a middle aged lady in a flowered dress, cigarette in the ashtray. She sat at a desk with an old Underwood typewriter, smoking and typing. She told me to sit at the table and answer the questions on the paper and then to take a seat. I would be called. She was pleasant, but it was obvious that this little office was her domain and she apparently ran it all by herself.
So I filled out the form, which included all the items you might guess as well as my current student status. Having graduated from a high school seminary, I was on my way to Niles Seminary on my soon-to- be-sidetracked pathway to the priesthood. When my turn came, she looked over my answers without comment. She began typing on a form from which I could see a small portion of which would become a wallet size perforation card.
She extracted the form from the typewriter and tore off the little card piece, handing it to me and saying “You’re 4-D.” Anticipating my next question, she added, “That means you’re a divinity student. You’re exempt from the draft as long as you stay one.” So I tucked the card in my wallet and left. Nothing happened to me that day, but it did to so many others.
If you went through that door and could prove you were going to college, you left as a “2-S”, deferred as a college student. But if you were a high school grad with no college plans, or just working a job somewhere, you left through that door as a “1-A”. And as a “1-A“ in 1967, you would find yourself within 30-45 days at another door, early in the morning on the day you were informed by registered mail to report for a physical at 615 W. Van Buren Street. You would spend most of that day walking around in your underpants, following a taped colored line on the floor with a bunch of other guys in their underpants. At some point you would be standing in a line with ten other guys all buck naked while some medical type poked around your genitals and made comments to an assistant.
And at the end of the day, you would go home, but you would shortly receive official “greetings” from the Draft Board that you needed to report within a matter of days to a bus depot or a train station or an airport. You could find yourself fighting for your life as an “11-Bravo” rifleman, or grunt, in Viet Nam within as little as four months. Tens of thousands of kids did. And more than 58,000 saw the end of their lives there.
———–
If the recent documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick makes any point about Viet Nam, it is just this: It was a raging twenty year storm that consumed our nation, consumed the lives of thousands of Americans, and continues to haunt veterans, protesters, and in a way all of us to this day. It was a colossal series of misreads, bad assumptions, and outright lies over several presidencies that needed to be exposed. Going through that door at 43 N. Pulaski and all of the 43 N. Pulaski’s around the nation was how most young men entered into that storm.
It is a masterful documentary, told in first person by the soldiers and officers on both sides, now all old men. And in the case of the North Vietnamese, old women, because women fought that war side by side with the men in North Viet Nam, and in great numbers. Their stories are sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes uplifting. The transformation of those at home who became radicalized by Viet Nam is a big part of that story. And then there are those who both fought as soldiers and became radicalized after, and their stories are the most powerful and the most haunting at the same time.
We’ve never needed a “feel good” story as much as we need it now and the Burns documentary is a sobering downer, mostly. All of the bad stories are there: My Lai, the naked little girl running from the napalm strike, the public execution of a Viet Cong guerilla, Jane Fonda telling the camera that U.S. POWs should be executed, Kent State, campus demonstrations at home, the 1968 Democratic Convention, helicopters being pushed off our aircraft carriers, the final defeat. You find yourself shaking your head at how this nation could be so wrong for so long and at the enormity of the sacrifice. Ken Burns has worked on this for years, and I’m sure he didn’t anticipate the current sorry state of American leadership coinciding with the release of this film, but there it is.
And you find yourself a little conflicted, because the intense singleness of purpose and incredible willingness for self-sacrifice shown by the Vietnamese in the North begins to resemble our revolutionary war forefathers. They just wanted us out of their land and we wouldn’t go. The final irony is that after we did leave, and they tried their textbook communism with no luck for ten years, they are now almost a functioning democracy and certainly a thriving economy. Check out your shirt label that says “Made in Viet Nam.”
————-
It was never black and white. There were patriots and heroes and cowards and scoundrels, but who was who? There were thousands who enlisted, true believers eager to fight for their country or to stem the flow of communism, or just looking for some action. Some outstanding combat leaders, career soldiers, stoic POWs, whistle blowers on atrocities, and those who saw it through to its end. But they are the few bright lights in the storm. For most of us, no one wanted anything to do with Viet Nam in 1967. It was a meat grinder and it went on and on, funneling more and more soldiers “in country.” And “The Draft” became the focus for all of us, looming out there as either inevitable or somehow to avoid.
There were ways out. You could enlist in some other branch like the Navy or Air Force or Coast Guard. Even if you went to Viet Nam, it was considerably safer than as a grunt. You could sign up with the Reserves or National Guard, and do your basic training and MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) training on active duty, then six years of weekends and summer camps, but the waiting lists were long and the draft might catch up with you before you got in. You could go to Canada, and some 30,000 did.
You could stay in school, but you better carry a full load and not flunk out, or your 2-S deferment was immediately turned into a 1-A. You could join ROTC in college, look for a safe officer’s MOS, but that boomeranged on more than a few guys I knew after they graduated.
And it wasn’t just civilians who wanted no part of Viet Nam. I knew a draftee who volunteered for Officer Candidate School and did 26 years in the Army. In his retirement I asked him why he chose that route. He told me he didn’t want to go to Viet Nam, although he caught the tail end of it anyway. A college friend did two years as an officer in Korea, and when I asked him why two years, he told me it was to get out of Viet Nam, which he succeeded in doing.
—————-
So now we’re all old men, having made our decisions at that young age, or maybe having those decisions made for us. The Draft is no longer. The medical exam station at 615 Van Buren, once a place for processing humans is now ironically a headquarters for a meat processing company. The office at 43 N. Pulaski is still the middle of the West Side, but now maybe in the most dangerous neighborhood in the city.
Those 1-A kids who fought and somehow made it home have long since earned our respect and they retain the solemn pride that is theirs alone. Those kids who volunteered and went looking for a fight and got through it untouched can bask in their conviction. The wounded, both physical and mental, have to soldier on, missing an arm here, a leg there, their eyesight, maybe some of their sanity. Some of them were taken years afterward by the defoliating chemicals used there. They never made it into their 60’s and they were casualties, too, although their names won’t appear on any monuments. The dead are remembered on a long black wall in Washington, D.C., listed in the order in which they fell, and by those who loved them. And in the end we lost that war, as was foretold by many as early as 1963.
But I think back to that terrible storm that lasted so long and took so many and I think of the nice lady in the unimpressive office at her typewriter and I wonder how many kids took their first step into the storm that day and never knew it.
Such an unassuming door they went through and such an unseen storm on the other side.
Having been carried for nine months by a woman, having been raised with sisters, schooled by women for eight years, supervised the work of women, worked for women, been a father to women, and married to a woman for almost 49 years, I feel I have the academic equivalent of an earned PhD in “Insights into Women.”
I hear you laughing, ladies.
The following is not meant to be a guide to what women want or think; no such work is possible and women know this perfectly well. Even if it could be written they would change it because they could. Think of it as helpful hints and observations for guys. Who knows, it might just save your life someday. Feel free to share it with a guy who is engaged or newly married; if he is only half the knucklehead I was as a new husband, it will definitely help.
———
Women like order. They believe men create disorder. How do I know this? Case in point, we are sitting in the condo of friends of ours in Phoenix, AZ. A coffee cake was on the table, partially consumed. I reached for the knife and cut a small uneven corner off of one side. Both my wife and my friend’s wife instinctively reached for the knife to straighten out the coffee cake once again. Both looked mildly vexed at my action, as if the universe had slipped out of alignment until they applied the fix.
———
Women believe in rules. Men not so much. I see a sign that says “Not a Thru Street” and I read “You can get through on this street.” I see a sign that says “Entrance to Lake Shore Drive Prohibited” and I read “Prohibited, yes, but possible.” The highway overpass sign says “Time to 95th Street 16 minutes” and I say to myself “I can beat that time”. Women don’t believe any of that stuff.
———
No woman has ever liked The Three Stooges. I’m not sure why.
———
Women need to vent without you fixing it. Hardest lesson for guys to learn. We always have the quick fix at our fingertips and are only too happy to trivialize her pain. It never works and it took me years to learn to listen, maybe ask a question, listen some more and wait for her to finish venting.
——–
Women need shoes. As many shoes as possible and in every color. Get over it.
——–
Women own the house rules. It’s not your nest; you are only allowed to eat and sleep there. If you fill the dishwasher, she will refill it. If you exceed your laundry expertise (my personal limit is bath towels), you will invite her displeasure. Use the little towels in the bathroom? See what happens.
——–
Women don’t like you “man-splaining” things. ”Hey, babe, you’re doing it wrong. The way this works is….. “
——–
Women can see a spot or stain on clothing from deep space. They have a personal relationship with their clothing you will never get. They don’t like it when their clothing gets messed up and it would be best if you weren’t the cause.
———
Ruth Bader Ginsberg might have been one of the most important women in America. She most certainly was the most admired.
———
Women can be in combat. Ever see a woman when her child is endangered or insulted? Delta Force and the Navy Seals on their best day couldn’t be more ferocious.
———
Women are better at confrontation. And they know what wimps we are. Take a male manager who needs to address an inappropriately dressed female office worker. It will never happen. He’ll either delegate it to another woman or hope it goes away somehow.
———
Women invented something for themselves to take the place of the neighborhood tavern where the guys hang out. Only they call them book clubs.
———
Women who can fall asleep while you drive the car are paying you a compliment. They are telling you that they feel safe with you.
———
Women process criticism differently than men. A respected basketball coach I know who has coached both men’s’ and women’s’ teams tells it like this: “I gather the team together during a losing streak and let them all know that some of the members of this team are not pulling their weight. The women think ‘He’s talking about me’. The men think ‘Yeah, and I know the guys he means.”
———
All women can be divided into two groups: ones who you can picture (or have witnessed) doing a belly laugh and ones you never could. Marry the first kind, if possible.
———
Women can be severely critical of other women, but some women seem to be liked by all other women for reasons I don’t get: Reese Witherspoon, Ellen DeGeneres, Carol Burnett, Meryl Streep, Sally Field, to name a few. Jackie Kennedy was First Lady at 31 years of age and everyone seemed to love her.
———
Margaret Thatcher was listed as number six in a list of twenty real men in the gag book “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche.”
———
Women need to see all men married. They believe, and there is some research to support this, that they are the only thing standing in the way of you becoming the Neanderthal you would evolve into without her influence. She will introduce you to culture to offset your passion for all things sporty, classical music to enhance the grunts you use in place of language, theater to add dimension to your two dimensional beer and sex-driven life plan. In short, to make you into a Renaissance Man whom she can proudly display to her fellow wives as something she has molded from clay. And not fine clay like a sculptor might use. More like Play-Doh left out in the rain. (OK, this one might be a little snarky, but it was fun to write).
——–
Daughters more than sons end up being the caregivers to their parents. I’ve seen it too many times to deny it.
——–
And finally, Richard Burton as King Arthur in the musical Camelot got it right. “The way to handle a woman is to love her, simply love her.”
The little 8 inch square red brick stone at my feet had etched into it the words:
“2nd Deputy Fire Marshal Paul H. Conners
October 8th, 1954”
The red brick stone was one of a few hundred in a seldom visited memorial to fallen Chicago firefighters and paramedics just south of McCormick Place, and really only accessible by bike or footpath along the lakefront. The stones are loosely arranged by date and the more recent names I remembered from newspaper accounts or in a few cases because I actually knew them once. Or they were part of my neighborhood or perhaps because members of my family had attended a benefit for their families.
But this stone touched something in my memory. A story my mother told me because my father, himself a firefighter, almost never told fire stories. At least not to his children. And he had been at some of the more famous blazes in Chicago history: the LaSalle Hotel fire, which claimed 61 lives, the Our Lady of Angels fire, which claimed 95 lives (92 of them children), and the Mickleberry Plant fire the same year he died, which claimed 4 firemen and injured scores more. That doesn’t even begin to include the countless fires that had no names, only addresses and memories that disturbed their sleep.
Actually, he did confide one to me, but it was more of an observation than a story. He had been driving the Chaplain, Msgr. William Gorman to a big apartment fire. The good monsignor, not a line officer, had no problems issuing orders to fireman on the scene, apparently, and he told my dad to check around the back of the building for signs of fire. The back of the four story building was a solid brick wall and my dad said he started down the alley, seeing no signs. He told me he had a bad feeling about it, a premonition perhaps, and he stopped and turned to quickly exit the alley on a dead run. The entire wall collapsed, a single brick near enough to knock his helmet off, smashing the bronze eagle that adorned the old leather helmets. I have that helmet, sans eagle, today.
This story, however, did not involve my dad, but his close friend Thomas ”Scotty” McNaughton. I met Scotty once a month, along with my brothers, when my dad drove us down to the old Fire Department Drill School, which stood where the Jane Byrne Interchange now stands. Scotty had been injured in a fire years before and had been given the duty of night watchman at the Drill School until he could take his pension. Scotty was also a barber on the side, and I suspect a better firefighter than a barber. He never asked you what kind of haircut you wanted because he only knew one kind. We sported chopped hairdos for quite a few years, but with eight kids, you cut your expenses where you can.
The old man would sing out something that sounded like ”Oat, Laddie” to let Scottie knew we were there. He was always glad to see us and he talked the whole time to my dad while he butchered our hair. I guess he appreciated the break in the watchman monotony.
——————–
The death of a high ranking fire official would be front page news today. The newspaper account of Chief Conners’ death, however, ran deep in the paper, on page 37 of the Tribune on October 9th, 1954. A single column with a photo, it ran next to ads for Elgin watches and some classified ads. He died heroically, at age 60, after being on the job for 36 years at a fire he didn’t even need to be at. He had heard the calls over the radio and directed his driver to take him there.
The fire on October 8th was at the Streamline Cafeteria, 3648 Roosevelt. The restaurant was closed in observance of a Jewish holiday, so the fire had hours to build inside unnoticed. On the fourth floor, Chief Conners felt the floor giving way. He yelled at the three nearby firemen to get away. One of them, Scotty McNaughton, then 37, of Engine 95 (also my dad’s engine, but not his day to work) told the reporters that “Conners yelled get out quick and then he disappeared.” Three fireman, including Scotty, clutched hoses and were later pulled to safety, though injured. They found the Chief’s body after three pumpers drained the water from the basement some four hours later. That was Scotty’s last day as a working fireman due to his injuries. According to my mother, Scotty followed the pipes in the basement to get to safety, something he had learned in the coal mines of Scotland.
The last time I saw Scotty was many years later when he was retired and working at Brookfield Zoo. He was carrying buckets of water for the elephants that day and I don’t think he knew me.
—————-
We stood, feeling awkward and a bit uncomfortable, in the Council Chambers of City Hall, as my son in law, Kevin Durkin, and another fireman/paramedic were given citations for bravery. They were returning from an ambulance run one night and saw an apartment building on fire. Bailing out of their rig, they banged on doors to awaken and alert the occupants, all of whom escaped. I believe a policeman on the scene wrote it up and they were decorated for saving so many lives.
We are not used to being in the public glare and standing in and among people you see on television can be disconcerting. We endured, however, had our pictures taken with Kevin, who considered the whole event needless and way over the top, the mayor, some alderman types and Fire Department brass. It was, looking back, a proud family moment. I couldn’t help but think of the family link of fire service going back all of those years.
————–
As I left the memorial on the lakefront, two thoughts occurred to me. The first was the sheer number of stones engraved with the names of the fallen; more than a hundred. The second was the number of blank stones still waiting to be etched. Each one will someday mark the loss of a man or woman sworn to protect us and I pray that those stones will be etched as slowly as possible. But I know someday they will all be filled and they will need to add more stones after that.
They take risks every day and do their jobs and, like my father or Scotty or Kevin, mostly keep the scary stuff to themselves, but they know the danger is out there. There is honor in all honest work, but somehow those little red stones speak to an honor of a higher order.
You must be logged in to post a comment.